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MOSIM

The overall goal of the MOSIM project is to realistically simulate complex human motions in the context of different use-cases. In academia and on the market, up to now, only isolated digital human simulation approaches are available. For instance, individual tools can already address the simulation of setup paths or ergonomic validation. However a comprehensive simulation of manual assembly scenarios comprising heterogeneous activities is not possible yet. Nonetheless, given the available tools and motion synthesis approaches, most of the requested simulation capabilities are already available. A major hurdle for combining the available technologies is the lacking availability of source code and expertise and uneconomically high porting effort. To allow the open and efficient utilization of these technologies and tools for a comprehensive simulation and benchmarking, the MOSIM projects targets to provide an open standard for connecting heterogeneous digital human simulation approaches in a common framework. In particular, the efforts for incorporation and implementation should be minimized, whereas the major programming languages and platforms shall be supported. Ultimately, the MOSIM framework enables the end-user to combine the best motion synthesis approaches available. Given the MOSIM framework, a new value chain comprising different roles is generated. In particular, vendors of simulation software can sell comprehensive simulation environments. Moreover, a new business for selling digital human simulation approaches in a modular way is created. For exchanging simulation functionality in a different domain than motions, a widely used solution named Functional Mock-up Interface (FMI) is already available. The proposed MOSIM framework is strongly inspired by the FMI approach. The Functional Mock-up Interface is a standard that supports the exchange of dynamic simulation models as well as its co-simulation while being tool independent. This standard is based on a combination of xml-files and compiled C-code [1]. An instance of an FMI component is called a Functional Mock-up Unit (FMU). By using the FMI standard, it is possible to perform a simulation of different FMUs, containing appropriate solvers, whereas only the simulation results of the FMUs are exchanged after defined time steps. This approach is called FMI for co-simulation [2]. The concept of modular motion units as derived in the MOSIM project, which is also referred as Motion Model Interface (MMI) approach, builds upon the idea of the FMI concept to further extend the standard to simulate human motion. Orchestrating various sub-simulations as intended by the FMI or MMI approach requires a superior instance managing the distributed sub-systems. In general, this orchestration process is named co-simulation, whereas the co-simulator updates the components and incorporates the results. Recently, in literature various co-simulation approaches for the FMI standard have been proposed ([3] [4] [5]), however, these systems predominantly focus on signal flow modeling mainly in the mechatronic domain. Since the co-simulation of digital human simulation systems has entirely different requirements, these solutions cannot be directly used. To implement the aforementioned aspects, a standardized framework satisfying the heterogeneous requirements of the digital human simulation approaches, co-simulation, behavior modeling and use-cases is required. The document is structured as follows: Section 2 proposes the overall concept of the MOSIM framework, depicting the main concepts and components. In section 3, the proposed technical architecture is presented in detail. In particular, in section 3.1 the main technical framework and the components are revisited. Section 3.2 focuses and the description of the respective formats and data structures by means of class diagrams. Section 3.3 explains the overall process and workflow of the framework. Section 4 gives a conclusion and summary of the presented framework. Moreover, in the appendix additional example files are provided.

Structure of the documentation

In the page MOSIM Framework we are describing the general architecture and how it operates from a principle standpoint. The page technichal architecture provides an overview of all components within the MOSIM framework.

For an easier lookup, we provided an index of all MOSIM interfaces and datatypes.