Simcenter STAR-CCM+ Best practices for FMU with the option of "Tool coupling scenario with result files"

The Functional Mock-up Interface (FMI) is a free standard that defines a container and an interface to exchange dynamic models using a combination of XML files, binaries and C code zipped into a single file. It is supported by 150+ tools and maintained as a Modelica Association Project on GitHub. The code is released under the 2-Clause BSD, the docs under the CC-BY-SA License.

FMI is the preferred model exchange and co-simulation format of many customers at system level enabling the exchange of models with internal and external partners using different modelling tools.

When you have an FMI with tunable parameters, some of the things to note are as follows:

• Tool coupling FMUs require the originating *.ame file to be opened in its folder, this is where the result file will be written
• The original path (folder of this Amesim model) is defined by a string parameter, “amemodelpath” exposed by the tool coupling FMU. Such parameter doesn’t exist when the “tool coupling scenario with result file” option is unchecked
• By default, the value of this parameter is set to be the path on the original (Amesim) machine. As a result, when using any FMI importing tool on this same machine, it should work out of the box
• This parameter can be adjusted by the end-user if
  • They use the FMU on the Amesim machine but they moved the location of the *.ame file
  • They use the FMU on another machine to which they have copied the *.ame file (it is therefore in a location that is distinct from the default value of the amemodelpath parameter)
• Adjusting this parameter requires the FMI importing tool to be able to access/modify the fixed “amemodelpath” string parameter
• If you receive an error saying that the value “null” seems to be provided, it means that the default value was not used. One simply needs to provide the path to the open *.ame location