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ASCEND - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

ASCEND
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

ASCEND is a free, open source, mathematical modelling system developed at Carnegie Mellon University since the late 1978.[1][2] ASCEND is an acronym which stands for Advanced System for Computations in ENgineering Design. Its main uses have been in the field of chemical process modelling although its capabilities are general.[3] It was a pioneering piece of software in the chemical process modelling field, with its novel modelling language conventions and powerful solver, although it has never been commercialised and remains as an open source software project.

ASCEND
Developer(s) Stable release Written in the ASCEND team 0.9.7 / Dec 24, 2009 C, Python, Tcl/Tk, C++

Operating system Linux, Windows (and partial support for Mac OS X) Type License Website mathematical modelling GPL (free software) ascend4.org (http://ascend4.org)

ASCEND includes nonlinear algebraic solvers, differential/algebraic equation solvers, nonlinear optimisation and modelling of multi-region 'conditional models'. Its matrix operations are supported by an efficient sparse matrix solver called mtx .

ASCEND differs from earlier modelling systems because it separates the solving strategy from model building. So domain experts (people writing the models) and computational engineers (people writing the solver code) can work separately in developing ASCEND. Together with a number of other early modelling tools, its architecture helped to inspire newer languages such as Modelica.[4][5] It was recognised for its flexible use of variables and parameters, which it always treats as solvable, if desired[6] The software remains as an active open-source software project, and has been part of the Google Summer of Code programme in 2009, 2010 and 2011.[7]

See also
Art Westerberg AMPL APMonitor EMSO JModelica.org Modelica List of chemical process simulators

References
1. ^ Piela, McKelvey and Westerberg, 'An introduction to ASCEND: its language and interactive environment' (http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/HICSS.1992.183516) 2. ^ History of ASCEND (http://ascend4.org/History) from the ASCEND website 3. ^ ASCEND bibliography (http://ascendwiki.cheme.cmu.edu/Publications) 4. ^ Elmqvist, Mattsson and Otter, 1999, Modelica-a language for physical system modeling, visualization and
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ASCEND - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

interaction, http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/CACSD.1999.808720 5. ^ Karl Johan strm, 2001, Control of complex systems, Springer 6. ^ R. Sinha, V.C. Liang, C.J.J. Paredis, and P.K. Khosla, 2001, Modeling and Simulation Methods for Design of Engineering Systems. Journal of Computing and Information Science in Engineering 1 pp. 84-91. 7. ^ http://www.google-melange.com/gsoc/projects/list/google/gsoc2011

External links
Official website (http://www.ascend4.org/) ASCEND (http://ascend4.org/) wiki, including documentation and development notes

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