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Early in my career, when ML and AI weren’t as cool, I fell in love with modeling and simulations. As Joel Spolsky recently put it , sometimes you’re working on something that’s just too complicated to reason about with simple math, you can’t even begin to guess how the inputs affect the outputs. In such cases, simulation models will help you understand better complex problems. While working with…
Sometimes we face technical challenges like predicting the behaviour of a car when we brake at 60 mph. We spend a lot of time writing equations, testing assumptions and building a model that represents reality in a meaningful and useful way. The end product, the model, is like an artwork. It’s beautiful to the eyes of the “artist” who conceived it. An enigma for anyone else. Wouldn’t be nice if we…
If you work with Modelica you should be familiar with packages. Packages are a way to organize and structure your models. In this post I will show how to structure your models in a package. The post is accompanied by an example that is included in the Github repository ModelicaInAction . Modelica packages If you have a look at the Modelica Standard Library MSL you’ll notice that it’s a collections…
In the last posts I explained why Modelica matters and some of the features that make Modelica a great language for modeling dynamic systems. In this post I focus on some practical aspects, namely how to setup the open-source JModelica platform and how to compile and simulate Modelica models. The post is accompanied by a Github repository called ModelicaInAction . This repository contains all the…
This post is the second of a series of posts that cover some of the most important features provided by Modelica. Here I’ll describes the type system used by Modelica and how it helps avoiding trivial errors when writing equations. The post continues with a description of the Object-Oriented features provided by Modelica and how they help engineers model complex systems in a modular way. Variables…
Ask any engineer, and they’ll tell you - “It’s tough to model the real world!” Engineers perform a delicate balancing act when they create complex models of physical systems, building detailed simulations while at the same time struggling against overwhelming complexity or irrelevant detail. Fortunately, there’s help. In this post I give an overview of the Modelica modeling language and the…
In this post I try to explain what is Modelica and why it does matter. Modelica, as the name suggests, is a modeling language. Which type of models? Mathematical models. As you work with the language you’ll quickly realize it has a strong focus on math. Having said that, Modelica does not focus on a specific real-world domain, like mechanical models for automotive industry, or financial models for…
Back in 2013 I decided to participate at the DV lottery, and thanks to a series of lucky strikes I was able to get my Green Card in September 2015! This post contains information that can be useful for people that are going through the same process. In particular with this post I’d like to give others some statistics and insights about the numbers that are pulled through the process. When are they…
How many times you needed time series data to test an algorithm? When this happens, you usually have a clear idea of how the data should look like but you don’t know how to generate it. I came across this problem at least 100 times over the last years… I tried every combination of the following tricks: interpolate values in tables, polynomials, sine waves, and step functions. As you can probably…
Recently Daniel McQuillen asked me to answer few questions on his blog TechPlusEarth.com . Daniel is a freelance software developer that I met while working at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory . Daniel is very interested in energy and technology and he has a blog where he tries to merge these two topics. If you’re interested in my interview you can find it here . During the interview I was…