About Simulation Activities

Simulation processes use simulation activities to run external applications, such as Abaqus/Standard and Microsoft Excel® and to move data between Process Composer and the application. You create a simulation activity inside a simulation process.

See Also
Introducing the Terminology and Structure of Process Composer
About the Content Page
Creating a Blank Simulation Activity

A simulation activity is similar to a simulation process in that categories describe the content of a simulation activity and help you organize your data. For example, you can use a document in the Specifications category to store material data that will be used by an Abaqus/Standard analysis. Similarly, you can use a document in the Results category to store the output database that is generated by the analysis. A simulation activity can refer to the content of a simulation process and vice versa. See About Categories for more information.

A simulation activity uses the application connector assigned to an OS command step to communicate with an external application. The Simulation Methods Developer creates the application connectors, and a connector should be provided for every application that your simulation might want to use. For more information, see About Application Connectors. If a connector is not available for your application, you can still download files to your working directory and manually run the application.

A simulation activity is processed in the following sequence of steps:

  1. Download data to the working directory.
  2. Run the external application assigned to the OS command, using the data in the working directory.
  3. Delete unwanted data from the database.
  4. Upload data generated by the application from the working directory.
  5. Remove all files from the working directory.

A simulation activity uses its download steps to move data from a category to the working directory where it can be accessed by the external application that is being run by an OS command step. Similarly, a simulation activity uses its upload steps to move data in the working directory that was generated by the external application into a category. Prior to running the upload steps, a simulation activity uses its delete steps to remove unwanted data from a selected category. For more information, see About Rules. You can choose whether to clean up the working directory after an activity has completed by deleting any files that were created by the activity, including any folders or sub-folders. However, Process Composer always cleans up the working directory if the job fails, regardless of your choice.

A simulation activity can access only the data that it contains. To access data that reside outside the activity, you must add referenced content that refers to the document containing the data. For example, the following figure shows an input file in the Results category of Activity 1. Activity 2 is using the same input file in its Specifications category. The user has added referenced content in Activity 2 that refers to the document containing the input file in Activity 1.

Referenced content in a simulation activity.

You must create a simulation activity within a simulation process. When you run the simulation process, Process Composer runs each simulation activity in sequence, although you can choose to skip selected activities. Alternatively, you can run only a specific simulation activity.