A Workbench for Multibody Systems ODE and DAE Solvers

During the last three decades, a vast variety of methods to numerically solve ordinary differential equations (ODEs) and differential algebraic equations (DAEs) has been developed and investigated. Few of them met industrial standards and even less are available within industrial multibody simulation software. Multibody Systems (MBS) offer a challenging class [5] of applications for these methods, since the resulting system equations are in the unconstrained case ODEs which are often stiff or highly oscillatory. In the constrained case the equations are DAEs of index-3 or less. Friction and impact in the MBS model introduce discontinuities into these equations while coupling to discrete controllers and hardware-in-the-loop components
couple these equations to additional time discrete descriptions. Many of the developed numerical methods have promising qualities for these types of problems, but rarely got the chance to be tested on large scale problems. One reason is the closed software concept of most of the leading multibody system simulation tools or interface concepts with a high threshold to overcome. Thus, these ideas never left the academic environment with their perhaps complex but dimensionally low scale test problems. In this paper we will present a workbench, ASSIMULO, which allows easy and direct incorporation of new methods for solving ODEs or DAEs written in FORTRAN, C, Python or even MATLAB and which indirectly interfaces to multibody programs such as Dymola and Simpack, via a standardized interface, the functional mock-up interface. The paper is concluded with industrial relevant examples evaluated using industrial and academic solvers.