There are many cases where simulation applications need to interact with their environment. Typical examples are Human-in-the-Loop (HITL) simulators (including flight, driving, and marine training simulators), Hardware-inthe-Loop (HIL) simulators, but also offline process simulators which cannot operate in a completely self-contained manner and therefore need to be coupled to external applications. Embedded control applications are another related area requiring interaction between applications and their environment. The Modelica_DeviceDrivers library, which had its first release as open-source library in 2012, tries to cater to such use cases. This paper describes the library for the first time and reports about the numerous challenges that the project experienced to meet its goal of supporting several platforms and tools within a standardconform, platform-generic, feature-rich, and easy-to-use Modelica library. Furthermore, the paper gives an insight into the inner mechanics of the library's communication and serialization functionalities, the various supported hardware interfaces and the possibilities to generate code for embedded systems.

This paper shows the various steps a simulation tool has to perform to create a real-time-capable model from a Modelica model. Reduction techniques are often necessary for complex models to meet the realtime requirements. For non-linear models with discontinuities no automatic methods of model reduction are known. The analysis methods supporting developers in identifying critical model parts are explained by means of an illustrating example model.

This article presents the different approaches and use cases for efficient parameterization of Modelica models by means of external data resources. The main motivation is to improve the overall quality, testability and reusability of Modelica application models (both on component and system level) by a separation of the behavioral implementation from its actual design parameters. The Modelica libraries ExternData and ModelicaTableAdditions are freely available to support library developers and vendors in their ambitions to offer clean and dedicated interfaces for the parameterization of the application models and to benefit from a large variability of commonly used file types, such as CSV, Excel, HDF, JSON, MATLAB MAT, XML or even domain-specific file types such as for tire properties or weather data.

This article reveals some implementation details regarding the C code of the revised table interpolation blocks released with the Modelica Standard Library (MSL) 3.2.1. The emphasis is placed on the unique features of the CombiTimeTable which are the discontinuities by time events and the periodic extrapolation. Basic information on the interpolation by Akima splines and the available table array memory optimization options are mentioned.

In this paper a new library for co-simulation of discrete element method and Modelica models is presented. For this a component-based approach is used that allows closed modeling and visualization of discrete element systems in a modelica tool. Translation into a native DEM description language and co-simulation is done by a separate compiler and backend. Usage and functionality are shown in a simple use case of a bucket excavator digging a hole.