A holistic framework for engineering simulation platform development gluing open-source and home-made software resources

• A gluing component concept for integrating open-source and home-made resources.
• We propose a holistic framework for engineering simulation platform development.
• Using TPL.Frame can save time and cost of simulation platform development.
• Gluing component-based strategy to achieve MB and FE codes coupling.
• TPL.Frame integrate open-source and home-made software resources conveniently.

The budgetary pressure of engineering simulation platform development is continuing to increase in industry, especially for those scientific institutions, while simulation platform is becoming increasingly important for the researchers in their daily work. Plenty of basic components provided for free by open-source communities can be used to develop simulation platform; however, using open-source components is much more technically difficult than directly utilizing commercial simulation platform. We propose a novel gluing components to tackle the existing difficulties of engineering simulation platform development by using open-source components and home-made resources. In order to reduce the development cost, a holistic framework named TPL.Frame, whose core is the gluing component, is designed to develop engineering simulation platform that consists of SALOME simulation platform, OGRE engine and some other home-made numerical codes. Unlike general commercial simulation solutions, the framework provides not only the basic functionalities, including CAD (Computer-Aided Design) and CAE (Computer-Aided Engineering), but also advanced features, such as real-time 3D visualization, interoperability between FE (Finite Element) method and MB (Multi-Body) dynamics, distributed simulation modeling and other user-defined features. To compare with traditional development method, several cases studied in railway industry are given to demonstrate how to rapidly develop engineering simulation platform using TPL.Frame, thus to prove the effectiveness of the proposed framework.