A Novel Task Management System for Modelica-Based Multi-discipline Virtual Experiment Platform

Abstract

Currently, there is few uniform modelling standards for virtual experiment (VE) systems of different disciplines. The scalability and compatibility of existing systems are relatively poor. The idea of Modelica provides a good opportunity for the unification of the modelling of multi-discipline VEs (MDVE). However, Modelica is an original multi-domain modelling method for scientific research, instead of for VE education. There are some obvious gaps to bring it into a MDVE platform (MDVEP), especially, if it is designed to support massive users and parallel modelling and resolving. This paper presents a new virtual experiment distributed task management system (VETMS) for MDVEP, which can improve the efficiency, stability and availability of the platform. It uses hierarchical design method to decouple the different modules and also provides a set of Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) for external calls. Besides, the system performance is also considered. A Modelica-oriented mechanism is proposed to tackle service failures. A parallelized Twisted framework is presented to overcome the problem of limitation of concurrent requests. Meanwhile, a NAT (Network Address Translator) traversal module of TCP based STUNT protocol is added to reduce the amount of data through master node. Experiment results show that the system can serve as a task management service for MDVEP with good performance.