Getting Started with Simantics

Simantics Installation Instructions

Text ...

Getting Started with Simantics

What is Simantics

Put in a nutshell: Simantics is a software platform especially for modelling and numerical simulation. That is, it is a basis, a grounding to build a modelling and simulation software or to integrate different software tools. Simantics package does not include any "Simantics solver", but all the solvers are third party components. At the time of writing this document, Apros, Balas, and Modelica integrations are under construction.

The platform contains a graphical client software Proconf build on Eclipse software framework and a database server Procore holding all the data. For an end user working on a workstation the server can be seen as a process running when the software is started, so in many cases you don't have to care about the client-server architecture and all its fine nuances. On the right there are some screen shots to show how Simantics look like. It is meant to be a fully featured, industrial strength modelling tool. Still, the main idea is something new and more that what modelling and simulation experts have used to. It is definitely worth giving it a chance!

Some examples of what Simantics can be used for:

• Graphical modelling environment for system simulation: For example plant modelling or electric circuit design using 2D diagram style graphical tools.
• Solver communication and integration solution: A solution for connecting existing numerical solvers for co-simulation.
• Solution for complex modelling data management: Data model for complex, large model base management, large model database that is developed by several modellers around the internet.
• Platform and a set of tools for distributed model development and simulation: Large, worldwide organisations need tools that support their distributed organisation. Simantics architecture is designed from the very beginning to support this.

The innovation under the hood in Simantics is its semantic data model used for practically everything from 2D graphics to modelling data and model domain mappings - this is the already mentioned database server. This technology allows the model database to be intelligent and flexible so that the data in the database is kept up-to-date and user's unnecessary work is minimised. The really nice feature of the semantic data model is the built-in ability to easily map somehow related data in the data base - as a matter of fact, the data does not have to be related at all. All kind of data can be mapped if the user wants it. Another nice feature is that the user can add rules to the data and so implement e.g. model validation into the data. This is especially useful for managing complex system models and large data sets. Imagine if you have to keep a model of a whole power plant or paper machine consistent and you have thousands of model components that have cross relations in the model.

What You Need to Use Simantics?

Simple and short answer: you need to download Simantics installation package for your preferred system (Windows or later Linux), install it according to instructions in the Simantics Installation Instructions page, read at least the next section Using Simantics, and start using the software. The installation package includes all basic components, i.e. ProCore server, ProConf client, and Eclipse. The only extra package you need to install is Java Runtime Environment. Check the Simantics Installation Instructions for more information on this, too. Simantics Principles

Simantics is licensed under Eclipse Public License (EPL). This gives quite much freedom for how to use Simantics for different purposes. All development done straight to the platform has to be given out as open source under EPL. But applications build on the platform that only uses the functionality of existing components can be licensed also with other licenses. The author of this kind of components is always responsible that there are no restrictions to other way for using other licence than EPL. E.g. if someone wants to use a so-called strict GPL license that requires all the code that is somehow involved to be GPL, this combination is not possible. Simantics licensing can't be changed to something else than EPL by no-one else than the copyright owners of Simantics.

Simantics is open source software. Our intention is to do, obviously in smaller scale, the same that Linux has done to computer user's community. We try to introduce the same openness and sharing attitude to the modelling and simulation community. There are huge number of excellent simulation software available as open source, but often they lack easy-to-use interface and interoperability. Simantics tries to solve this problem by offering an open, vendor independent platform for pre- and post-processing tools and solver integration. In fact, the powerful data model and rich graphical user interface features enable much more to be built on the platform. About Simantics Documentation

We work hard to keep also Simantics documentation up-to-date and rich for both end-users and developers, but during the pre-product phase we have to focus our small resources mainly to code development. This means there are large parts missing of the documentation and the existing documentation may contain errors. Please, be patient or contact us to volunteer for helping; the easiest way to contact us is from the Simantics web site contact page.

Simantics documentation is meant to follow Simantics software releases so that we freeze a snapshot of the documentation and start building a new one a short while after the software release date. This means that the documentation here won't be much updated but the major contributions are done to Simantics 0.6 Documentation wiki. This documentation will, of course, be open for everyone to read. Using Simantics

After installing Simantics (see Simantics Installation Instructions) you can start using Simantics by click the Simantics icon on your desktop, launch it from the command line, or select it from the menu - whatever is the way it is available in your preferred environment. After a short while a splash screen appears showing the nice Simantics puzzle piece logo and the loading state of the software. The platform asks for a workspace folder, you can accept the default folder. Next the graphical environment opens [fig 1].

Introduction to Simantics Concepts and Conventions

Text ...

Tutorial: Simantics Platform User Interface

Text ...