Modeling and Simulation Using the Compositional Interchange Format for Hybrid Systems

One of the major challenges towards a broad industrial acceptance of hybrid systems techniques and tools is the large number of distinct modeling formalisms and the resulting manual effort for the toolbased solution of many complex design or analysis tasks. A promising approach to achieve inter-operability between hybrid systems tools is to develop automatic translations of their formalisms via a general interchange format with sufficiently rich syntax and semantics. This paper gives an intuitive introduction to such a formalism, the Compositional Interchange Format (CIF) for general hybrid systems, that was recently developed within the European Network of Excellence HYCON. The concepts of the CIF are illustrated using an interesting example, the hybrid model of a supermarket refrigeration system. This system exhibits both, nonlinear DAE dynamics as well as significant discrete dynamics, and serves as a challenging case study for hybrid control techniques in several European research projects. Furthermore, the CIF tool set that provides simulation and visualization capabilities is introduced.