Towards an Open-Source Modelica Compiler in Julia

• Recently the Julia language has become an option for scientific computing. As of 2020, efforts exist to provide libraries that emulate the equation-based modeling features provided by Modelica or otherwise provide such functionality in Julia. The issue with these approaches is that investment in standardization and libraries would be lost unless standard-complacency is guaranteed. We believe that it is possible to combine features from both by implementing such a compiler in Julia. We argue that this approach would open additional opportunities. One such being the handling of variable structure systems (VSS) within the framework of a Modelica standard-compliant compiler. The other being a proposed compiler architecture reminiscent of LLVM for equation-based object-oriented languages. Using the OpenModelica Compiler as a baseline, we verified the fidelity of our implementation by simulating a selected set of models. While there are performance penalties, we argue that improvements to the frontend would mitigate these issues.

Subject headings

NATURVETENSKAP  -- Data- och informationsvetenskap -- Datavetenskap (hsv//swe)

NATURAL SCIENCES  -- Computer and Information Sciences -- Computer Sciences (hsv//eng)

Keyword

Modelica

OpenModelica

Compilers

Applied computing

Julia

Variable Structure Systems

Publication and Content Type

ref (subject category)

kon (subject category)