COSY: Language Definition for Modeling and Simulation
of Mixed Continuous and Discrete Processes
Introduction
COSY was designed as part of my
PhD dissertation as a tool for the
description of mixed continuous and discrete processes.
At that time, there existed no simulation language that would lend itself to
a clean and complete description of such processes. First attempts to designing
such a tool had been reported by Fahrland and Golden in the early seventies.
However, these language designs had never been completed.
As part of my
PhD dissertation, I first developed a Fortran-based
library of subroutines, called
GASP-V, that made it possible to
simulate correctly and efficiently mixed continuous and discrete processes.
GASP-V was used successfully by several research groups in
projects of theirs.
The aim of COSY was to simplify the modeling environment. A preprocessor
should be developed that would preprocess COSY programs into GASP-V. However,
I didn't have the necessary resources to develop that preprocessor by
myself.
Only in the early eighties, a slimmed-down version of COSY was implemented by the
British Ministry of Defence under the name MODSIM.
Although MODSIM was developed further in later years, I lost interest in this
development, since in the mean time, the
Dymola/Modelica modeling
environment had become available as a more flexible alternative.
Historical Development
- In 1977, COSY was designed as a modeling frontend to the simulation software
GASP-V. Although no preprocessor for COSY was available yet,
the language definition was fully tested and debugged by means of a
general-purpose parser program that had also been developed as part
of my PhD dissertation.
- In 1982, Nigel Baker of the British Ministry of Defence began to implement
a subset of the COSY simulation language definition under the name MODSIM.
A first version of MODSIM was made available in 1984.
Most Important Publications
- Cellier, F.E. (1979),
Combined Continuous/Discrete System Simulation by Use of Digital
Computers: Techniques and Tools,
Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, ETH Zürich, Switzerland.
- Cellier, F.E. and A.P. Bongulielmi (1979),
The COSY Simulation Language,
Proc. 9th IMACS Congress on Simulation of Systems,
Sorrento, Italy, pp.271-281.
- Cellier, F.E. (1986),
Combined Continuous/Discrete Simulation - Applications, Techniques and
Tools,
Proc. Winter Simulation Conference,
Washington, DC, pp.24-33.
Sponsors
- ETH Zürich
- British Ministry of Defence
Deutsche Version
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Last modified: January 22, 2006 -- © François Cellier