Open tools for cyber-physical production systems¶
GLACIER is an open-source ecosystem from the University of Verona for modelling, simulating and validating the software that controls manufacturing systems. Build a virtual version of a production line, develop the control software against it, and test it before it ever touches the plant.
What GLACIER gives you¶
A machine interface you can describe once. Machines expose their state and their operations through a data model — a tree of variables and methods declared in YAML, inspired by the OPC UA information model. Control software talks to that interface, not to a particular machine implementation.
A deterministic execution model. Frost is built on Lingua Franca, a coordination language whose reactors execute deterministically under a logical clock. Repeating a Frost simulation with the same inputs gives the same interleaving of events.
A path from simulation towards hardware. The same data model can be backed by a simulated machine or, through a connector, by a real OPC UA server or MQTT broker. Frost is designed so that control software written against a simulated plant needs few or no changes when the interface is pointed at real equipment.
Where the code is¶
Everything is on GitHub under glacier-project, under permissive BSD licences. The Repositories page says what each one is for.
Where this documentation stands
GLACIER is a research project under active development. These pages document the current development branches of the GLACIER repositories, and say so explicitly wherever the released versions differ. See Versions.