Micro Manager: a Python package for adaptive and flexible two-scale coupling

Abstract

The Micro Manager facilitates coupling between simulation software packages, which solve problems at different physical scales. Broadly speaking, simulation-based analysis is an effective tool to gain insights in real-world scenarios without incurring the high cost of prototyping and testing. Complex simulations are oftentimes broken down into simpler components, which are resolved by tailor-made software. Such complex simulations can be of multiphysics nature, meaning different physics are solved in different parts of the domain. To do such multiphysics simulations, we can couple different software packages together. preCICE (Chourdakis et al., 2022) is an open-source coupling library for partitioned multiphysics simulations. However, sometimes the coupling is not just between different physics but also different physical scales, which is frequently referred to as multiscale coupling. To understand how the scales affect each other, both scales need to be solved simultaneously while being coupled in a bi-directional manner. The Micro Manager, together with preCICE, is capable of handling a multiphysics and multiscale coupling. We refer to the coarse scale as the macro scale, and the fine scale as the micro scale. The name Micro Manager is derived from its core functionality of controlling a set of micro-scale simulations and coupling them to one macro-scale simulation via preCICE.