1642 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON MAGNETICS, VOL. 39, NO. 3, MAY2003 Unified Physical Properties Description in a Multiphysics Open Platform S. Giurgea,T. Chevalier, J.-L. Coulomb, and Y. Maréchal Abstract—This paper presents a generic and extensible imple- mentation of the physical property descriptor, embedded in the open source platform SALOME. Create a new physical model and use it in a complete problem description are the main facilities pro- vided by the physical property descriptor. The description proce- dure used in this environment is shown on an electrostatic example. Index Terms—Data model, object oriented programming, simu- lation environment. I. INTRODUCTION I N THE LONG RUN of technological improvements and re- duction of costs, devices tend to become more and more compact and complex. In such a situation, multiphysics analysis is often required for thorough sizing of the device. However, in- tegrated multiphysics simulation environments are still missing. The designer has to cope with several simulation tools and com- munication between them becomes a real burden. Therefore, it has been decided to develop an open source simulation frame- work that provides great facilities to plug any kind of solvers dealing with any kind of physics. This project, called SALOME, is detailed in a companion paper and the beta version of this plat- form can be downloaded from the Internet [1]. However, providing facilities for the integration of any kind of solver is not enough since the end user will also claim for a common interface and look and feel. As a consequence, a multi- physics unified data model is needed as well as generic program- ming to make a true multisolver platform become available. This paper describes the SALOME unified physical proper- ties descriptor. II. CONTEXT A. SALOME Overview SALOME is an open source platform designed to offer a full environment for multiphysics numerical simulation. It is widely using components technology and remote invocation techniques based on CORBA. The available components are—a solid modeler, universal physical property descriptor, mesh generator, solvers adapters, supervisor, and post processor. The main goal of SALOME is to allow every one to plug its own solver into the platform, with as few coding as possible, while taking benefits of the entire environment. Manuscript received June 18, 2002. This work was supported in part by the SALOME project. The authors are with the Laboratoire d’Electrotechnique de Grenoble, Saint Martin d’Hères 38402, France (e-mail: giurgea@leg.ensieg.inpg.fr; Thierry. Chevalier@inpg.fr; Jean-Louis.Coulomb@inpg.fr; Yves.Marechal@inpg.fr). Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TMAG.2003.810182 B. DATA: The Physical Properties Description Component The DATA component is responsible for attaching physical quantities to geometry or abstract structural decomposition of the device to model. It is also responsible for preparing simple parametric studies and generating the proprietary command file for any specific solver. For anyone having its own solvers, using SALOME as a de- sign environment means two separate and sequential tasks. 1) Plug the solver itself into the environment. This is done first and only once, and is the integrator responsibility. 2) Effectively use the SALOME environment for designing purposes. This is the end-user job. III. OPEN DESCRIPTION OF PHYSICAL PROPERTIES Due to the diversity of the different physical domains, it soon appeared that it was impossible to define a unique and uni- versal representation of physical properties. Even for a given domain of physics, different solvers may have different or at least partially different ways of defining physical properties. So, to achieve the unification of physical properties, a two-level ap- proach has been necessary. A. Meta Modeling of Physical Data Model Since each physic and each solver has its own data model or command set (so called specialized model), the only way to pro- vide support for external solver integration into a generic plat- form was to define a meta model, i.e., a data model that enables the description of any specialized model. Following object ori- ented (OO) meta modeling [2], [3], the specialized model is an instance of the meta model, and the data structures of the spe- cialized model are instances of the meta model data structures (called meta data). In our approach, any physics is modeled using the object-ori- ented programing (OOP) paradigm and also functions and rules. Therefore, our meta model should at least be able to describe all OOP concepts: classes, fields, methods, inheritance and/or com- mand set description. In that sense, it may be close to the meta model proposed by the Object Management Group (OMG) in relation with the unified modeling language (UML) formalism, for instance [4]. However, since the meta model was to be used in a particular context, i.e., numerical simulation and physical properties, not all the information lying in the UML formalism was deemed necessary. On the other hand, since support for in- tegration is requested, other information concerning data persis- tence management, graphic and textual user interface and coher- ence management guidance should be also included in the meta model, whereas they do not appear in the UML standard. 0018-9464/03$17.00 © 2003 IEEE