2021.2

This version was released on 2021-JUN-15

Modelon is proud to release Modelon Impact 2021.2 – delivering significant improvements and critical features. Launched in July 2020, Modelon Impact has set out to disrupt the way organizations engineer complex systems, keeping the barrier to modeling and simulation software as low as possible

New Features🔗

Parameter sweeps with automatic parallelization of compilations
Official 3D-animation support
Library browser filter
FMU Co-simulation Import
UI-support for working with libraries with syntax errors
Local equation balance checker

Parameter sweeps with automatic parallelization of compilations🔗

Parameter sweep

Parameter sweeps now include user interface support for experiment set up that require multiple compilations. This improves the productivity as compilations are automatic parallelized.

New functionality

Experiment support for “structural parameters” using range() and choices() operators
Automatic scheduling and parallelization of compilations

Improved Modelica code editor🔗

Improved Modelica code editor

There has been a significant improvement in the Modelica code editor making it easier and more efficient for experienced Modelica developers to create models programmatically.

New functionality

Quickly navigate to a class
- Open class by Ctrl + click
- Use arrows to navigate back and forth classes
Improved readability
- Theme selection – use a dark or light theme
- Code folding – annotations are folded
- Bracket matching - see where the code block start and end
- Comment code – use Ctrl-B to comment/uncomment code
- Word wrap – long lines are wrapped into multiple lines

Official 3D-animation support🔗

3D-animation

3D animation is now an official feature after being experimental since the 2021.0 release.

New functionality and improvements

Out-of-the-box-support – no need to enable any settings
Improved selection of objects – incl hiding objects to allow selection of objects inside
View 3D animation only show up if animation is available
Export 3D animation as GLB format - GLB is a widely supported binary 3D format that can be embedded into presentations (e.g. PowerPoint)
A lot of quality improvements!

Library browser filter🔗

Library browser filter

Quickly find a model or file using a library browser filter.

Filter as you type with instant feedback
Filter by model, package or file name

FMU Co-simulation Import🔗

FMU Co-simulation Import

It is now possible to import a co-simulation FMU¹ and connect and simulate it with Modelica models. A common use case is to import a controller develop in a 3rd party tool and connect it with a system model.

Note

Licensed FMUs that have dependencies (like external license server) to third-party software/binaries that are distributed outside the Modelica library are not currently supported.

FMU-import tool that automatically imports an FMU and generates a Modelica wrapper model

¹ Support for CS-FMUs generated on the same Operating System that Modelon Impact runs on (Windows on Desktop & CentOS 7 in On-prem)

UI support for working with libraries and models with syntax errors🔗

Models with syntax errors

Support for import and load of libraries and models with syntax errors.

New functionality

Import or load a library - Syntax errors show up as red dots in the package browser. Light red dots indicate a syntax error in a model inside a package
Resolve issue - Manually resolve issues in the code editor. Editor help indicates where the issue is.

Note - Only libraries stored in a folder structure with syntax errors can be imported

Local equation balance checker🔗

Local equation balance checker

Quickly verify that an equation system is locally balanced. This can increase productivity as a common error mode where equations & variables don’t match up can be detected early.

Plotting improvements🔗

Customize colors

Select a trajectory or result point and modify the colors using a plot UI
Color settings can be saved to views
Multi-color mode for parameter sweeps
- Click on Edit “Line color” and choose the multi-color icon to enable it

Units on the Y-axis

See the unit on the Y-axis

Additional features and enhancements🔗

Performance

Quickly inspect a component - Major loading time speed-up when inspecting a component, i.e. when navigating to a sub-system
Simulation speed-up – reduce overhead when executing from UI
Improved symbolic manipulation – can in special cases reduce the size of equation systems which improves simulation performance
Support for Modelica inverse annotation - can improve simulation speed and robustness.

Usability

Improved source-code formatting
- Duplicating a model now preserves formatting
Improved compiler error messages for failed size evaluations
Improved diagnostics for encrypted models – easier to debug models including encrypted components
View the result of cancelled simulations
Improved support for redeclared components
Unit settings support in experiment setup – easier to set up experiments on a larger time scale
Support for Modelica annotation HideResult

Model utilization

Improved optimization toolchain – support for more Modelica constructs in the Casadi-toolchain
- Support of external functions, functions with unknown sizes, nested functions with unknown sizes, enumerations, better handling of if-statements
- Increased the performance of CasADi transfer by around 60% for large models
New solver for CS FMU export - Runge-Kutta (2nd order).
Custom function improvements – option to specify if a pre-compiled FMU is not required

Improved Python scripting support in OCT

Model statistics in json-format
- Set compiler option “generate_json_statistics”
Dynamic diagnostics Python package - "oct.diagnostics.DynamicDiagnostics"
- Find which state(s) limit the ODE solver step size
- Get the step lengths
- Get the clock time of each step
- Get the information on solver settings
- List the time of events

And a lot of quality improvements - Enjoy!