Section: New Software and Platforms

SICONOS

Participants : Vincent Acary, Maurice Brémond, Olivier Huber, Franck Pérignon.

In the framework of the FP5 European project Siconos (2002-2006), Bipop was the leader of the Work Package 2 (WP2), dedicated to the numerical methods and the software design for nonsmooth dynamical systems. This has given rise to the platform siconos which is the main software development task in the team. The aim of this work is to provide a common platform for the simulation, modeling, analysis and control of abstract nonsmooth dynamical systems. Besides usual quality attributes for scientific computing software, we want to provide a common framework for various scientific fields, to be able to rely on the existing developments (numerical algorithms, description and modeling software), to support exchanges and comparisons of methods, to disseminate the know-how to other fields of research and industry, and to take into account the diversity of users (end-users, algorithm developers, framework builders) in building expert interfaces in Python and end-user front-end through Scilab.

After the requirement elicitation phase, the Siconos Software project has been divided into 5 work packages which are identified to software products:

1. Siconos/Numerics This library contains a set of numerical algorithms, already well identified, to solve non smooth dynamical systems. This library is written in low-level languages (C,F77) in order to ensure numerical efficiency and the use of standard libraries (Blas, Lapack, ...)

2. Siconos/Kernel This module is an object-oriented structure (C++) for the modeling and the simulation of abstract dynamical systems. It provides the users with a set of classes to describe their nonsmooth dynamical system (dynamical systems, intercations, nonsmooth laws, ...) and to perform a numerical time integration and solving.

3. Siconos/Front-End. This module is mainly an auto-generated wrapper in Python which provides a user-friendly interface to the Siconos libraries. A scilab interface is also provided in the Front-End module.

4. Siconos/Control This part is devoted to the implementation of control strategies of non smooth dynamical systems.

5. Siconos/Mechanics. This part is dedicated to the modeling and the simulation of multi-body systems with 3D contacts, impacts and Coulomb's friction. It uses the Siconos/Kernel as simulation engine but relies on a industrial CAD library (OpenCascade and pythonOCC) to deal with complex body geometries and to compute the contact locations and distances between B-Rep description and on Bullet for contact detection between meshes.

Further informations may be found at http://siconos.gforge.inria.fr/