MasterSim is an FMI Co-Simulation master and programming library. It supports the Functional Mockup Interface for Co-Simulation in Version 1.0 and 2.0. Using the functionality of Version 2.0, it implements various iteration algorithms that rollback FMU slaves and increase stablity of coupled simulation.

MasterSim is being developed actively at the TU Dresden, Institut für Bauklimatik (see contact page).

Installation programs for MasterSim are hosted on GitHub:

Ubuntu users may simply install MasterSim via package repository:

1. Add repository:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ghorwin/sim
sudo apt-get update

2. Install MasterSim:

sudo apt install mastersim

Parts of MasterSim

MasterSim consists of three parts:

• MasterSimulator user interface
• MasterSimulator command line executable
• MasterSim programming library

Why use MasterSim?

First of all, it is free! The complete source code is available on its GitHub-project page under an open source license.

But there are many other reasons for using MasterSim:

• MasterSim is a cross-platform development, available for Windows, Linux and MacOS
• Support for scripted execution
• Support for several FMU instances within the same co-simulation scenario
• Highly configurable master algorithms
• Auto-connection feature in user interface (very useful when connecting FMUs with many matching inputs and outputs)
• Detailed simulation statistics inform about where in your co-simulation is most of the simulation time spend; This is very helpful for performance tuning and selection of the optimal algorithm
• Support for parallel executed variation studies (several MasterSimulator processes), where the same FMU file is used concurrently in several simulations running in parallel
• Diagnostic options that assist FMU developers when debugging their FMU code
• Source code comes with few dependencies on other libraries (only C/C++ standard library and Qt for the user interface), which ensures long lifetime and compatibility for many platforms.
• Software and code is actively developed, used and maintained at the Institut für Bauklimatik, TU Dresden

Details about these features can be found in the documentation (see documentation page).

MasterSim Software Library

Library Functionality

With the library you can implement co-simulation functionality into your own simulation programs with little effort.

FMU Import functionality

The library supports extraction of FMU archives, reading of modelDescription.xml files, importing shared library symbols into memory. This is all neatly encapsulated in corresponding classes.

Master-Algorithms

Included in the library source code are standard master algorithms, such as Gauss-Jacobi, Gauss-Seidel and Newton. They can be readily used in own code without any work necessary (except for tuning of some numerical parameters, perhaps).

Best-practice guide and example code

The command line co-simulation solver MasterSimulator and the user interface code can be used as guide and tutorial on how to write such code yourself.

Co-Simulation Standard Support

The library supports currently the FMI Co-Simulation Standard 1.0 and 2.0. Some of the algorithms (i.e. all algorithms that need setting back of FMU states) require FMI v2.0, but Gauss-Jacobi and Gauss-Seidel work with FMU 1.0 as well.