SysML Simulation in Modelica and Simulink

Enterprise Architect, as a leading Systems Engineering tool, allows models to be constructed using industry-compliant modeling techniques and languages for the representation of cyber-mechanical systems. These models act as devices for communication between collaborating engineers, teams of consultants and others, but can also be used to generate advanced visualizations using industry-standard modeling languages used by OpenModelica and MATLAB's Simulink.

This example shows the power of Enterprise Architect in leveraging existing open standards to visualize solutions. The diagram depicts two tanks connected together, and a water source that fills the first tank. Two continuous controllers are used to regulate the flow of water from the first tank to the second, and the output from the second tank.

A set of diagrams is created in Enterprise Architect that models the physical aspects of the tanks and the equations (written in the Modelica/MATLAB language) that characterize the flows between the tanks. Once the simulation has been configured and the Solve button selected, the output resembles this diagram:

We will discuss the details of the constraint and parametric modeling in a later section of this topic, and see how the models that we create are simply Block Definition and parametric diagrams that we learnt about in an earlier section of the guide. This Parametric diagram shows an example of the modeling for the two-tank problem, using constraint properties and connectors that bind the parameters into a system of equations. Other diagrams are necessary to produce the result but this is the main diagram that shows the mass, flows and the sensor determining the level in the tank.