Paper Conference

Proceedings of SimBuild Conference 2008: 3rd conference of IBPSA-USA

     

Using Spark as a Solver for Modelica

Michael Wetter, Philip Haves, Michael A. Moshier, Edward F. Sowell
Building Technologies Department, Environmental Energy Technologies Division, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA
Dept. of Mathematics, Computer Science and Physics, Chapman University, CA 92866, USA
Dept. of Computer Science, California State University, Fullerton, CA 92834, USA

Abstract: Modelica is an object-oriented acausal modeling language that is well positioned to become a de-facto standard for expressing models of complex physical systems. To simulate a model expressed in Modelica, it needs to be translated into executable code. For generating run-time efficient code, such a translation needs to employ algebraic formula manipulations. As the SPARK solver has been shown to be competitive for generating such code but currently cannot be used with the Modelica language, we report in this paper how SPARK's symbolic and numerical algorithms can be implemented in OpenModelica, an open-source implementation of a Modelica modeling and simulation environment. We also report benchmark results that show that for our air flow network simulation benchmark, the SPARK solver is competitive with Dymola, which is believed to provide the best solver for Modelica.
Pages: 37 - 44
Paper:
simbuild2008_TS03-1-Wetter