RMQFMU: Bridging the Real World with Co-simulation Technical Report
This is an incremental tool for practitioners in co-simulation and digital twin domains to integrate historical data and real-time hardware.
The paper tackles the problem of bridging co-simulation environments with real-world data by developing RMQFMU, a tool that enables data exchange via AMQP protocol, and reports on its application in case studies to facilitate digital twin concepts.
In this paper we present an experience report for the RMQFMU, a plug and play tool, that enables feeding data to/from an FMI2-based co-simulation environment based on the AMQP protocol. Bridging the co-simulation to an external environment allows on one side to feed historical data to the co-simulation, serving different purposes, such as visualisation and/or data analysis. On the other side, such a tool facilitates the realisation of the digital twin concept by coupling co-simulation and hardware/robots close to real-time. In the paper we present limitations of the initial version of the RMQFMU with respect to the capability of bridging co-simulation with the real world. To provide the desired functionality of the tool, we present in a step-by-step fashion how these limitations, and subsequent limitations, are alleviated. We perform various experiments in order to give reason to the modifications carried out. Finally, we report on two case-studies where we have adopted the RMQFMU, and provide guidelines meant to aid practitioners in its use.