EMPHYSIS

Project results

eFMI emerges as an open standard, offering a systematic approach to developing advanced control functions tailored for safety-critical and real-time targets. At its core, eFMI serves as a standardised workspace – a common ground – for information exchange and collaboration among stakeholders and their tooling, working on different abstraction levels and viewpoints of a common cyberphysical product. The eFMI workflow empowers developers to model systems at a higher level of abstraction, starting with a reusable, high-level, component-oriented and physics equation-based model. eFMI tools automatically transform this into a solution suited for embedded software, enabling a wide variety of advanced model-based approaches for control and diagnosis. The main benefits are:

• Overcoming vendor lock-in thanks to eFMI being an open standard.
• Accelerated development time and reduced costs thanks to automated toolchains.
• Enhanced utilisation of domain experts and their tooling by providing well-defined plug-in points for the physics modelling and embedded domains.
• Facilitating new ways for OEM-supplier collaborations with complementary viewpoints and respective toolsets along the eFMI workflow.

Exploitation

EMPHYSIS showcased its process through 11 industrial use-cases in the automotive domain, a Modelica open source library with 22 examples comprising about 40 real-time simulation configurations, and 13 tool prototypes supporting eFMI of which 6 have been commercially released in the meantime.

The indicators of conducted assessments are auspicious: eFMI reduces the time and risk to market of embedded control software for complex cyber-physical systems, increases collaboration and knowledge exchange between physics-based engineering and embedded software domains, and increases productivity. The virtual sensor industrial demonstrators are in particular disruptive technologies since such applications had not been considered affordable for physical systems of this level of complexity. The development effort and risk of errors in handwritten respective C production code solutions are unacceptable.

The results of the EMPHYSIS project were transferred to the Modelica Association Project eFMI (MAP eFMI - https://www.efmi-standard.org) in 2021 to prepare them for open access standardisation and publication, and the organisation of a volunteer community promoting and developing eFMI. In addition to the eleven original EMPHYSIS project partners who immediately joined MAP eFMI, the subsequent membership applications from Altair Engineering Inc., Institute of Vehicle Engineering CO. LTD, Mercedes-Benz AG, and Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories further underscore the project’s broad relevance across diverse sectors.

A major milestone has been the provisioning of a complete eFMI toolchain backed by first commercial tool releases available on the market and covering the whole eFMI workflow from physics modelling in Modelica to production code on dedicated embedded platforms.

In essence, EMPHYSIS was a journey of innovation and collaboration that has paved the way for a transformative technology for embedded software, and MAP eFMI is set to carry the torch forward.