The Functional Mockup Interface – FMI: Introduction and Use Cases

Overview

The Functional-Mockup-Interface has been a remarkable success story for a standard: developed in a European Research project with a first release in 2010 it has become the de-facto standard for exchanging system models between tools, and for co-simulations. FMI is by now supported by more than 140 tools and counting.

In this webinar, we looked at how FMI works, what its main use cases are, and why engineers responsible for simulation workflows and model-based design should know about it. A Functional-Mockup-Unit is a model that conforms to the FMI Standard. We looked at co-simulation using FMUs, and what implications co-simulation has for collaborative workflows within and across organizations.

At the end of the webinar, I gave an outlook that is coming to FMI, which is still actively developed and extended to new use-cases. I will also give a glimpse at two new companion standards to FMI that have been released in 2019: The System Structure and Parameterization (SSP) Standard, and the Distributed Simulation Protocol (DCP). Both standards support the use of FMUs in co-simulation use cases.

This webinar was available to all NAFEMS members exclusively as part of their membership.

About the speaker

Dr. Tummescheit is the Chief Solutions Officer of Modelon, President of Modelon Inc., and one of the founders of Modelon.

Dr. Tummescheit received his MSc in Mechanical Engineering from the Technical University of Hamburg-Harburg, Germany in 1996, and his PhD in Automatic Control from the University of Lund, Sweden in 2002.

He has been involved in the Design of the Modelica language from the beginning and is the developer of a number of open source and commercial Modelica Libraries in the energy and HVAC domains. In 2003 he worked as a research scientist at United Technologies Research Center and returned to Sweden in 2004 to start Modelon AB, the first company fully dedicated to tools and services based on Modelica and FMI. Dr. Tummescheit is also a member of the board of the Modelica Association, and of the FMI steering committee, and active in the future development of both standards.

Dr. Tummescheit has served as the CEO of Modelon AB from 2004 to 2012 and moved to Hartford, Connecticut in 2013 to establish Modelon as a leading force of innovation in system simulation in the US.