What is Modelon Impact and how is it different? If you’ve been working on system simulations for any amount of time, you’re probably familiar with Modelon. They’ve offered this library of components that you can use for system simulations for quite some time. They’re really well known for the accuracy of those components, which obviously will affect the accuracy of the overall system simulation. They’ve come out with a new offering called Modelon Impact. Let’s dive into what exactly that looks like.
What are The Three Main Components of Modelon’s Solution?
There are really three main components of Modelon’s solution. Many people are familiar with the library of components that you can use to build up these system simulation models. The next component here is Modelon Impact. There are multiple ways you can build up your model. You can actually have a coding interface. If you’re more technical, you can certainly use that to build up the system’s model. Another way is to use a drag and drop interface. You see this a lot today with these system simulation tools. You can drag components onto a canvas and then connect the inputs to the outputs of one another. It could be another way that you run your simulation.
There’s an interesting mix of capabilities here. The big movement nowadays is to use these drag and drop interfaces to build up models. It makes it more accessible to engineers who can’t code. Modelon Impact has some interesting mixes between the two. There are different ways that you can combine them. You can actually reuse some apps that are built up using these tools, but they can be re-used. So, whole applications that then can be plugged into.
You can kind of flip back and forth between these views. It makes for a very interesting user interface in lots of different applications. We talked about the two different ways you can build up your model either through this coding interaction or a drag and drop interface.
The other way is to build up an app. This actually gets into the engine side of things. You can take your model and the engine will compile it so that it will run. This actually can be delivered back into the modeling kind of environment as an application. Think about the engineer that basically just wants to be able to give some inputs and run the simulation, but doesn’t want to know all the technical details here. This will let them do that.
This is actually part of the modeling environment. It lets them kind of combine these applications maybe with some of their own work. This combination of different ways to work with the model and build it up and reuse stuff, whether it’s from a library or an app, it’s really flexible.
Why Modelon is Different from Other System Simulation Modeling Tools
I like it because I see a lot of other system simulation modeling tools where there’s a lot of technical expertise that’s required, or you have this purely drag and drop interface. It’s interesting with Modelon Impact. You can kind of mix and match these as you want. They’re basically two different views on the same stuff. It can be really productive for engineers.
The ability to use these different ways to build up the model and then execute the model is really what enables these fast design decisions. You’re making more informed decisions, especially at the system’s level because you gain more insight into its behavior. Behavior is often a big issue when you have different domains or disciplines having to integrate together to make a system kind of work as a whole.
But that’s not the only way that you can use Modelon’s set of tools. You can actually also use their runtime environment to take one of these applications, and then run it remotely. You can do this maybe by streaming sensor data to it, using it as an input, and using it as a digital twin.
That’s really exciting. You can do that during testing to get more insight for prototyping and testing. You can do it out on the edge to kind of support predictive maintenance. There’s lots of different ways to use it.
That’s the story with Modelon. As you can see, they’ve expanded quite a bit beyond this library of components, which has value on its own. You can use that library components even if you’re using other modeling tools. It doesn’t have to be used exclusively with Modelon’s set of modeling tools and its engine. You can see they’ve really expanded beyond that. It’s really interesting how there’s lots of different ways to build up the model and then a couple of different ways to execute it. If systems simulation is important to your company, this might be a good fit.
