Object oriented design of an interactive mechanism simulation system - Clodion

Mechanical system simulation software is of fundamental importance to compu ter aided design in mechanical engineering Such software systems considerab ly reduce turn around time and have applications in various industries like automative, aerospace and general machinery. A number of mechanical simula tion systems are commercially available. However. many of these systems are legacy systems, not necessarily with modern graphical user interface techn iques, and also not necessarily designed with newer simulation algorithms o r robustness considerations. In this paper we describe the design of a. int eractive mechanical system simulation package - Clodion. The package has be en designed using object oriented design, with careful use of software stru cturing and also user interface design principles. The design of Clodion ha s a number of innovative features in the form of its class hierarchy specif ically designed for mechanical systems, its event propagation design method ology and its visualization and other utilities. We also present some resul ts which show the user interaction scheme as well. (C) 1999 Elsevier Scienc e Ltd. All rights reserved.