Exudyn – High-Performance Multibody Dynamics Simulation

Exudyn is a C++ based Python library for efficient simulation of flexible multibody dynamics systems. It is the follow up code of the previously developed multibody code HOTINT, which Johannes Gerstmayr started during his PhD-thesis. It seemed that the previous code HOTINT reached limits of further (efficient) development and it seemed impossible to continue from this code as it was outdated regarding programming techniques and the numerical formulation at the time Exudyn was started.

Exudyn is designed to easily set up complex multibody models, consisting of rigid and flexible bodies with joints, loads and other components. It enables automatized model setup and parameter variations, which are often necessary for system design but also for analysis of technical problems. The broad usability of Python allows to couple a multibody simulation with environments such as optimization, statistics, data analysis, machine learning and others. The Python library runs on Windows, MacOS and Linux, and iit can even be compiled at single-chip computers such as Raspberry Pi. The parallelized code runs on multi core nodes of supercomputers and can also make use of MPI parallelization for parameter variations and optimization. Exudyn is integrated into Python and is available on GitHub and as a Python installer.

Current research focuses on application to artificial intelligence, e.g., using reinforcement learning methods, parallelization of medium-scale multibody systems, applications in robotics and programmable matter, efficient formulations and model order reduction for flexible bodies, and Lie group methods.