System simulation in the context of system engineering is widely used in the aerospace industry, but also in the automotive industry and in most other civil and military engineering domains. The ThirdEye currently can most readily be used for space projects because that is the original authors professional occupation. Nevertheless there is nothing preventing the usage of ThirdEye for automotive or other engineering projects. Apart from the usage in real engineering projects, ThirdEye because of its open-source nature is ideally suited to be used in a teaching environment such as universities.
Open the ThirdEye!
With the ThirdEye one can see things that are not real (yet)!
ThirdEye is a free and open-source system simulation framework. It can be used to model, simulate and analyze multidomain dynamical systems. Being based on the Eclipse platform, ThirdEye runs on most computer platforms and a large variety of operating systems. The main development targets are Linux and MS Windows systems, nevertheless ThirdEye should run on any platform with a Java runtime environment. ThirdEye provides solving of initial value problems e.g. spacecraft orbit propagation or thermal meshes. While the models are simulation specific, the ThirdEye kernel is reusable and follows a modular design pattern. It consists of several plug-ins, responsible for different functionalities of the simulator. The main functionalities are: The orchestration of the simulator models into a system, the propagation of in- and outputs between the models, the sequencing of the calculation of the models functions and the logging of the simulation for later analysis. The functionality of the simulator kernel can be enhanced by extensions (not to be confused with Eclipse extensions). The most common extensions are user defined simulation models, but the user can also extend or modify the simulator kernel by implementing custom model calculation sequences or integrators. Currently an example model extension and a space model extension is available together with the simulator kernel.