cosim

cosim is a command-line co-simulation tool based on libcosim. It has three primary use cases:

• Running co-simulations from a command-line environment
• Running co-simulations from other programs or scripts
• FMU testing and debugging

Specifically, cosim can be used to perform the following tasks:

• Run a simulation based on a system structure given in either OSP or SSP format
• Run a simulation based on a single FMU (usually for testing/debugging purposes)
• Show information about an FMU

The output from the simulations is in the form of CSV files that can be easily parsed by other programs.

Usage

The command syntax for the program has a "Git-like" subcommand structure. That is, all commands are on the form

cosim <subcommand> <arguments...> [options...]

For example, the following will run a simulation based on the system description in path/to/my_system and write the results to path/to/my_results, providing extra information (e.g. progress) to the user's terminal:

cosim run path/to/my_system --output-dir=path/to/my_results -v

The documentation is built into the program itself and can be accessed by means of the help subcommand.

How to build

The tools and steps required to build cosim are more or less the same as those required for libcosim, so we refer to the libcosim README for this information. There are some noteworthy differences, though:

• Conan 2.x is a mandatory requirement for the time being.
• Doxygen is not needed, as there is no API documentation to generate.

To summarise, a typical configure–build–run session might look like the following. On Linux, starting from the root source directory (the one that contains this README):

conan install -s build_type=Release --build=missing .   # Install dependencies
cmake --preset=conan-release                            # Configure build system
cmake --build --preset=conan-release                    # Build
cmake --build --preset=conan-release --target=install   # Install to dist/
build/Release/dist/bin/cosim help                       # Run

And on Windows:

conan install -s build_type=Release --build=missing .   &:: Install dependencies
cmake --preset=conan-default                            &:: Configure build system
cmake --build --preset=conan-release                    &:: Build
cmake --build --preset=conan-release --target=install   &:: Install to dist/
build/dist/bin/cosim help                               &:: Run

In both cases, Release and conan-release can be replaced with Debug and conan-debug, respectively, if you're building for development purposes. See the Conan CMakeToolchain documentation for more information about CMake presets (and what to do if your CMake version doesn't allow you to use them).

The cmake --target=install command will copy the resulting cosim executable to the build[/Release]/dist/bin directory. The shared libraries that cosim depends on will be copied to the same directory or to build/Release/dist/lib, depending on platform, by the conan install command. Thus, the dist directory contains the entire release bundle. You may also choose to install to a different directory by setting the CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX variable, but note that dependencies won't be included in the installation then.