mosaiks are made of tesserae: GUI design for a co-simulation framework

TL;DR

This paper introduces tesserae as a visual, systematic way to design co-simulation scenarios in mosaik, complemented by a GUI for drag-and-drop setup creation, enhancing accessibility without sacrificing flexibility.

Contribution

It presents tesserae for intuitive scenario description and extends mosaik with a GUI, making co-simulation setup more accessible while maintaining its modular architecture.

Findings

Tesserae enable simultaneous creation and connection of entities.

The GUI allows drag-and-drop setup of co-simulation scenarios.

Multidirectional data-flow remains consistent without manual synchronization.

Abstract

In a mosaic, a tessera is a single stone. We introduce tesserae for the co-simulation framework mosaik, where they are sets of entities. They allow for a visual, intuitive, and yet systematic description of simulation scenarios by allowing their entities to be created together and the entities of two tesserae to be connected simultaneously, while ensuring that multidirectional data-flow between tesserae remains consistent without further manual synchronization. We further present an extension of mosaik by a graphical user interface (GUI) based on these tesserae, enabling the drag-and-drop creation of co-simulation setups and their execution. The GUI aims to make mosaik more accessible to users previously excluded by its script-based nature. At the same time, it preserves mosaik's flexibility, extensibility, and modular architecture.