Liaison: an open-source tool for distributed co-simulations

Abstract

This paper presents Liaison (Liaison, 2025) a new open-source tool designed to address challenges related toportability, security, and intellectual property whensharing Functional Muckup Units. Built on the FunctionalMuckup Interface 3.0 standard, Liaison has a server-clientarchitecture that leverages Zenoh for communication(Corsaro et al., 2023. Zenoh is a novel pub/sub/queryprotocol that supports a variety of network topologiessuch as peer-to-peer, routed, mesh and brokeredcommunication with minimal configuration, settingLiaison apart from similar tools. An example of a case thatled the authors to develop this tool (Software-in-the-Looptesting of sail control systems for wind assisted propulsionof ships (Laursen et al. 2023)) is presented.