Simulation Reproducibility of a Chaotic Circuit

TL;DR

This paper investigates the reproducibility challenges in simulating a chaotic circuit using LtSpice across different computers, highlighting the impact of finite precision and proposing a methodology to identify optimal computational setups.

Contribution

It introduces a methodology to assess and improve simulation reproducibility of nonlinear systems across different hardware and software configurations.

Findings

Reproducibility varies significantly across different computers.

The proposed methodology effectively identifies the computer with the best prediction horizon.

Finite precision impacts the accuracy and reproducibility of chaotic circuit simulations.

Abstract

An evergreen scientific feature is the ability for scientific works to be reproduced. This feature allows researchers to understand, enhance, or even question works that have been developed by other scientists. In control theory the importance of modeling and simulation of systems is widely recognized. Despite this recognition, less attention is paid to the effects of finite precision of computers on the simulation reproducibility of nonlinear dynamic systems. In this work, a case study of reproducibility is presented in the simulation of a chaotic Jerk circuit, using the software LtSpice. In order to do so, we performed simulations of the circuit in the same version of the software on different computers, in order to collect the data and compare them with experimental results. The comparison was made with the NRMSE (Normalized Root Mean Square Error), in order to identify the computer with the highest prediction horizon. Tests performed in 4 different configurations showed the difficulties of simulation reproducibility in LtSpice. The methodology developed was efficient in identifying the computer with better performance, which allows applying it to other cases in the literature.