ScilabTec'09

To improve the levels of education in India, the ministry of human resource development has launched an ambitious educational mission with an outlay of about US $ one billion. It is proposed to be implemented through information and communication technologies. The following minimum requirements are placed to fund a project through this mission:

1. It has to be inter-institutional
2. It should be development oriented, in any general field of college level education
3. Any material developed through this mission has to be delivered as open source
4. It should belong to any one of the about twenty sub-missions identified in the mission document, available at www.sakshat.ac.in.

One of the main activities of this mission is to create 1 GBps connectivity to every one of the 30,000 colleges and research institutions in India.
Open source software creation and use is one of the thrust areas of this mission. Some of the activities undertaken in this area are:

1. Promoting the use of open source/free software through workshops and other publicity
2. Creating educational content around existing open source software
3. Promoting the use of open source software in audio/video courses and virtual labs, the other thrust areas of this mission
4. Creating documentation, books and courses in the area of open source software
5. To take necessary steps to include open source software in the syllabi of various universities

At IIT Bombay, we are focusing on Scilab, Python and Sage in the area of numerical computation, and Blender in the area of 3-D animation.

After the success of Scilab 5 releasing a brand new user-friendly interface, the Scilab Consortium aims at making Scilab a major actor in various fields such as High Performance Computing, code generation, embedded systems, ... while giving to users more and more advanced and powerful features.
Scilab 6’s ambition is announced: pursuing Scilab 5’s improvements with great perspectives of development concerning the programming language itself, calculation performances and a better use of architecture's capabilities.

This presentation shows how the original Scicos code generator has been modified to obtain code for different real-time targets. In particular, the code generator creates an initialization procedure, a termination procedure and a third function which can be called from a real-time periodic task to perform activities which require a precise sampling time. Different didactic and commercial applications implemented in the Linux RTAI environment are presented.

This talk will show the ongoing work on Scicos for the code generation on embedded microcontrollers. The FLEX Scicos Toolkit will be presented, with results in various contexts, from real-time control to monitoring and hardware in the loop. Various works on Scilab will be presented from various universities working with the FLEX toolkit.

This optimization problem deals with the search of the best set of pipes in a network with a specific layout. The single objective is to minimize the overall network cost and the constraints are the minimum pressures at the demand nodes. The Scilab script uses the same method and formulas of EPANET to model the behavior of water distribution piping systems. The flow continuity and Hazen-Williams headloss equations are solved using the Gradient Method of Todini and Pilati. This is a good example of how a Scilab script can be integrated in modeFRONTIER to implement a calculation or use Scilab as an external solver in an optimization loop, and in a fast way too.

Grocer is the Scilab toolbox for econometricians. Econometrics is a very lively branch of statistics devoted to economic questions and Grocer proposes most standard procedures of the field as well as some original features. Grocer has been written in Scilab because:

• Scilab provides features for computing matrix;
• Scilab has some optimization programs particularly useful in econometrics;
• Scilab is very similar to the Gauss and Matlab software, this allows easy adaptation of many existing econometric programs;
• Scilab offers a great programming flexibility;
• and Scilab like Grocer is free and opensource.

Grocer is used by practitioners, researchers and students in various countries. Grocer offers a detailed documentation and a dedicated mail box. Grocer is regularly evolving and next version is planned for the second half of 2009. Grocer is available at Scilab toolboxes center and at http://dubois.ensae.net/grocer.html

Scilab has been used successfully for now several years, in CNES (French National Space Agency), in order to carry out flight dynamics activities and mission analysis (orbit design). The presentation will explain how Scilab is used throughout the satellite cycle of life, ie from the early trajectory design phases up to the operations. Scilab is one tool within the rich software environment and we will present how Scilab fit within the various tools used. Finally, we will give some words on the development and use of an orbit analysis toolbox written in Scilab.

GreenScilab is a Scilab(c) toolbox simulating plant growth and architecture based on the GreenLab model (De Reffye and Hu, 2003). This type of model combining the description of both plant functional growth and architectural development is receiving more and more attention for applications in agriculture, forestry, ecology or computer graphics (De Reffye et al., 2008). Most models are purely simulation-based and rely on very heavy computations: the morphogenesis and functioning of each organ is simulated. The simulation times are quickly prohibitive and make such models ill-adapted to calibration from experimental data or to solve optimization problems.

In this context, GreenLab's originality is its mathematical formulation as a discrete dynamic system based on the structural factorization of the growth grammar (Cournède et al., 2006), in order to take advantage of the numerous similarities and repetitions in plants. Scilab provides a free, efficient and easy-to-use environment to implement the dynamic equations of plant growth. GreenScilab is thus born, being the first open-source software that fulfills model simulation and calibration. It can simulate different botanical plant architectures, plant growth processes, the effects of climate conditions on plant growth, and calibrate the model from experimental data on real plants. A graphical user interface is developed using TCL/TK to facilitate model I/O. Some functions are written in C to speed up simulation.