Continuous system simulation in Python

[Nicolas Pernetty]

On Thu, 06 Oct 2005 22:30:00 -0700, Robert Kern <robert.kern at gmail.com>
wrote :

> Dennis Lee Bieber wrote:
> > On Fri, 7 Oct 2005 01:12:22 +0200, Nicolas Pernetty
> > <nicopernetty at nowhere.fr> declaimed the following in
> > comp.lang.python:
> > 
> > > I'm aware of SimPy for discrete event simulation, but I haven't
> > > found any work about continuous system.
> > > I would like to develop a generic continous system simulator, and
> > > so would be eager to join any open source effort on the subject.
> > >
> > >For instance, it would be useful for modelling an airplane with all
> > > the dynamics (flight simulator).
> >
> > 	Unless that flight simulator is running on some big ugly ANALOG
> > computer (the ones that used rheostats, transformers, and
> > amplifiers), they all are really using discrete time intervals and
> > computing values at those time points. Such computation may require
> > integration of continuous functions from previous time step to
> > current time step.
> 
> I think Nicolas means "(discrete event) simulation" as opposed to
> "discrete (event simulation)" and "(continuous system) simulation" as
> opposed to "continuous (system simulation)". The methods used in SimPy
> to model (discrete events) don't apply terribly well to simulating
> many (continuous systems) like airplane dynamics. For example, an ODE
> integrator would probably want to adaptively select its timesteps as
> opposed to laying out a uniform discretization upfront.
> 

Yes you are absolutely right. That's what I wanted to mean.
Thanks