Proteus Offers Modeling Hub for Engineering Students 

For companies specializing in product lifecycle management (PLM), cloud enablement is an integral part to a modern software offering, as many manufacturers are looking to move their operations to the cloud.

But in academia, cloud-based modeling technology has been largely overlooked, preventing the type of collaboration many professionals already take advantage of. This problem prompted a team of researchers from Nanyang Technological Institute to develop Proteus – an academic hub for collaboration and innovation for modeling and simulation.

Proteus was developed as a free-to-use academic research platform. Researchers made the platform to provide students and educators a place where they could easily create and share computer models and simulations.

To accomplish this, the team used Modelica, a non-proprietary, object-oriented and equation-based language designed to model physical systems. It also includes the ProteusGWT simulation tool that uses a graphical, component-based approach to systems modeling.

ProteusGWT's repertoire spans mechanical, hydraulic, thermal, control, electrical, electric power and process-oriented subcomponents to offer address problems across multiple domains.

To address issues of scalability and deployment, the Proteus team integrated web technologies such as HTML5, Google Web Toolkit (GWT) and cloud computing. The simulation tool gets part of its name from GWT as it provides necessary building blocks for complex web applications.

With enough popularity, its creators hope Proteus will become a comprehensive repository for all sorts of physical system models. From there, students can create models of all sorts of systems: powertrains, mechanical arms or even V6 engines to help understand how the work.

They can further explore each system by modifying various elements and running simulations that examine how these changes impact performance. For example, by modifying wheel radius a student can learn about its impact on torque.

Alternately, these models could serve as a jumping-off point to new inventions that could be shared with others across the community.

Proteusweb, the online portal used to access Proteus, is currently in public beta, and is accessible to anyone with a computer or browser-enabled device such as a tablet or smart phone. Even after its beta period has ended, anyone will be able to access Proteusweb to create and contribute computer models.