About
PyMbs has originally been developed at Dresden University of Technology at the Institute of Processing Machines and Mobile Machinery by a questing quartet:
Carsten Knoll & Christian Schubert & Jens Frenkel & Sebastian Voigt
Chair of Construction Machines and Conveying Technology
carsten(d)knoll(a)tu(min)dresden(d)de
We startetd working on PyMbs in July 2009, as we faced the need of a convenient way to obtain the equations of motion of complex mechanical systems to feed a real time simulation environment based on the Modelica modeling language. By the release of PyMbs 0.1 these aim could be achieved.
Finally OpenModelica supported multibody simulation out of the box and should be used if you want to have something just working. However PyMbs was still used for research regarding efficient simulation of large systems and symbolic manipulation of systems of equation.
Today PyMbs is still used in real-life engineering projects, especially in cases where:
commercial multibody software is just over the top
commercial multibody software can’t handle a certain problem efficiently
the problem itself is not too complex but a lot of automation and processing is involved - this is where PyMbs and Python shine
low level access to the equations of motion is required
the environment (programming language) does not support multibody simulation
PyMbs’ symbolic capabilities are “misused”, e.g. to generate explicit equations for sensors within a system
So PyMbs will hardly get new major features, but it is constantly maintained to work with latest Python and dependencies.
If you face any problems using PyMbs, feel free to file an issue on GitHub.