Design and validation of an annotation-concept for the representation of 3D-geometries in Modelica
Thomas Hoeft · 2008
Simulation models of complex technical systems need beside the description of their physical behav-iors also a representation of their 3-dimensional ge-ometry and topology. Up to now, the Modelica lan-guage specification [1] includes only rules for 2D-primitives in form of specialized annotations. Start-ing from this point, this paper illustrates the design and validation of an advanced annotation-concept for embedded 3D-geometries in physical models. The basic idea consists in the combination of specialized 3D-annotions for classes and objects with a standard-ized description of 3D-geometries and topologies. Therefore the X3D-standard [2] is used by the au-thors. Based on the founded similarities and parallel-isms in the object-oriented concept of Modelica and the node concept of X3D an annotation concept for the embedding of the 3D-geometries was designed. Further an extension for the Modelica-simulator MOSILAB [3] in form of a 3D-editor plug-in was developed for the generation of X3D/Modelica-scenes and the validation of the new annotation con-cept. Finally the annotation-concept was evaluated in a simulation use case, where the physical model of a simplified Pool-Billiard game [4] was combined with its 3D-geometry description.