Running a simulation

Running a simulation#

Basics#

At this step, you must have :

  • installed properly siconos as explained in Build and install

  • created a directory for your simulation,

  • written in this directory a ‘driver’ file, either in C++ or in python, as presented in siconos_tutorials or in one of the numerous examples of Browse examples

Then, simply use siconos script on you driver (driver.cpp or driver.py):

siconos driver.cpp

Reminder: if siconos_install_path is not a standard path of your system, you may need to set some environment variables, mainly:

  • append siconos_install_path/bin to PATH

Plugins mechanism#

Some classes (mainly for dynamical systems and relations description), proposed a plugin (callback) mechanism, to allow user to set its own function to compute some specific operators. This is detailed in User-defined plugins.

A ‘plugin’ is a dynamic library, generated from c++ source file, providing a set of functions that could be dynamically called by siconos objects.

The rules are :

  • Siconos will consider any directory named XXXPluginXXX (XXX being whatever you want) or ‘plugins’ as a plugin directory

  • for each plugin directory, siconos will create a library named XXXPluginXXX.ext (ext depends on your system) from all sources files in this directory

See for instance Mechanics/BouncingBall where external forces are defined with a plugin.

Extra source files#

If needed, some user-defined source files can be taken into account. This may be useful to define some new classes, derived from standard siconos classes (see for instance example Biology/StepSystem), to interface siconos with an other software and so on. Anyway, to do this, just run:

siconos --src_dir=path_to_extra_src YourDriver.cpp/.py

where path_to_extra_src is the directory where extra source files are saved. Notice that by default, siconos will always check for additional sources in “src” dir of the current directory.

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