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Comment by bglazer | Hacker News Reader

Here are some examples. Looks like a simplified framework for writing physical and electrical system simulations.

https://mbe.modelica.university/

Over 20 years ago I modeled an internal combustion engine, an automatic transmission and a multibody chassis model all in a single model. IIRC, the model had something like 250,000 equations in it and it modeled combustion, hydraulics, friction, and 3D rigid body motion. It is capable of far more than simple models.

https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/document?repid=rep1&type=pdf&d...

Ah! You're the author of Modelica by example?

Yes. And "Introduction to Physical Modeling with Modelica". I also built the Modelica Playground (which I deliberately didn't link to because a thundering herd of HN readers would have crashed it).

Nice to cross your path, I got the first one to kickstart myself some years ago (and still struggling with evaporation / condensation).

Would you recommend the second to introduce a colleague to OpenModelica? He is into gPROMS but will lose access to the software at retirement.

Sidenote: invest in software with freedom to operate and good knowledge reusability.

Modelica by Example is the most recent and free, so I would recommend that.

Are you aware of any books like your "Introduction to Physical Modeling with Modelica" but for readers without a background in EE, math, physics? I am looking for something for a mediocre SWE like myself. It doesn't have to be Modelica; I could try learning MatLab or Mathematica, etc.

Well if you are interested in the intersection of software engineering and technical computing, I'd recommend Julia. I'm currently working on JuliaSim which is a Modelica like system built on top of Julia. So Julia might interest you as a programming language and then you could pick and choose what aspects of things like ModelingToolkit if you are interested in the engineering, math and physics aspect or you can just stick to the software/programming aspects of Julia.

That’s incredible, I had no idea this was even possible. Are most auto manufacturers modelling their vehicles this way? Seems like an amazing way to search for optimizations, predictive failures, etc.

It is pretty wide spread in automotive. I think nearly all F1 teams use it (hard to know for sure since they are quite secretive, but it is very common in my experience)

I wouldn't say simplified. You can model a lot of systems with it. It's pretty good.

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