Advanced open source data formats for geometrically and physically coupled systems

Abstract

Numerical calculations based on models are nowadays standard tools in all engineering disciplines. The tools, which faciliate the modeling, generally include all tasks in an engineering workflow. These tasks range from simple model descriptions to advanced visualization of results.

While the incorporation of all tasks in one tool fits neatly into a single-person scheme, it makes teamwork with shared tasks very hard. In particular, every member of the team has to use the exact same software, and every sub-task has to be available in the tool. This requirement, in turn, makes a joint development of advanced methods unnecessarily complicated. Especially the numerical analysis of problem tailored methods requires a detailed knowledge of all model ingredients.

The basis for joint workflows and teamwork are interfaces and common data formats. In this publication, we briefly present a workflow and derive the needs and requirements for data formats. Finally, we discuss the state-of-the-art techniques and explain how the described formats fit into them.

Numerical calculations based on models are nowadays standard tools in all engineering disciplines. The tools, which faciliate the modeling, generally include all tasks in an engineering workflow. These tasks range from simple model descriptions to advanced visualization of results.

While the incorporation of all tasks in one tool fits neatly into a single-person scheme, it makes teamwork with shared tasks very hard. In particular, every member of the team has to use the exact same software, and every sub-task has to be available in the tool. This requirement, in turn, makes a joint development of advanced methods unnecessarily complicated. Especially the numerical analysis of problem tailored methods requires a detailed knowledge of all model ingredients.

The basis for joint workflows and teamwork are interfaces and common data formats. In this publication, we present a data format for geometrically and physically coupled systems. The data formats structure bases on the standardized format JSON, whereas the content is derived from a mathematical model. Finally, for presentational purposes, we present an instance of a simplified model.