DownloadScicos > History
Scilab/Scicos history
Scicos has been developed as part of
the
scientific software package Scilab.
It
would be difficult to grasp the history of Scicos without some
knowledge of Scilab’s history.
Scilab
The ancestor
of Scilab, Blaise, later named Basile,
started in 1982 by Francois Delebecque at
INRIA.
Inspired by the original public domain Matlab developed by Cleve Moler at MIT, Francois Delebecque
and Serge Steer of the Theosys team
directed by Alain
Bensoussan produced a scientific software
package that
included not only an interpreter and elementary matrix operations but
also a
large number of simulation and optimization routines. Most of these
routines
came from free software projects, some were
contributed from other INRIA teams the most important of which were
perhaps the
optimization routine developed by Claude Lemarechal and the graphics routines by Americo
Marrocco. Another major component of
the software
developed then was the Signal processing toolbox developed by Carey
Bunks under
the direction of F. Delebecque.
Basile
was distributed as a commercial product by Simulog,
an INRIA startup company, starting 1984 and was successfully
distributed in
The Scilab
core was developed in the Meta2 project team, headed by Jean-Pierre Quadrat, mainly by S. Steer, F. Delebecque
and J. Ph. Chancelier
from ENPC, ex Meta2 PhD student who made important contributions, in
particular
the Scilab graphics, which had to be redeveloped because of copyright
issues,
the X11 GUI and later, the GTK GUI. Ramine
Nikoukhah started the Scicos
toolbox and Claude Gomez and Maurice Goursat
developed Metanet; its graphical editor
was later fully integrated in
Scilab by J. Ph. Chancelier and S. Steer.
This group of developers, later
called the "Scilab team", released the first version of Scilab in
1994; they were responsible for every aspect of the product, including
maintenance,
packaging and documentation, until 2003. The team also worked on
promoting
Scilab: two books, one in English
and one in French,
were published and the Scilab
newsgroup was put in place by C. Gomez and R. Nikoukhah.
Important events during this period were the
A startup
Company called Saphir-Control
was created in 1998 by Habib Jreige , an ex PhD student
of the Meta2 project. This company provided support for Scilab and
Scicos to
industrial users. It played an important role in the promotion of
Scicos.
The Scilab development team
under the
auspices of the Scilab
Consortium
took over Scilab in 2003. Scilab team headed by C. Gomez had the
responsibility
of packaging the software, porting it to new platforms, providing first
level
user assistance, and, the promotion of Scilab. The Scilab team has
since been
reinforced taking on other responsibilities such as the development of
the new
object oriented graphics library started in 2000 by S. Steer and Djalel
Abdemouche in Metalau project, the
development of a Matlab/Scilab
translator realized primarily by Vincent Couvert,
and
the development of a new Java-based GUI.
ScicosLab
When the Scilab Consortium launched the development of Java-based
Scilab 5 in 2005, the Metalau project team and ENPC decided to maintain
their own version of Scilab, based on Scilab 4,
for disributing new software developments stemming from research
activities of the Metalau team at INRIA and ENPC. This
version, first called ScilabGtk, was renamed later ScicosLab to avoid
all confusion with the Scilab software. ScicosLab contains in particular
the latest versions of MaxPlus and Scicos, which are toolboxes
developed in the Metalau project.
Scicos
The Scicos formalism was developed by Ramine
Nikoukhah inspired in part by the work on
the extension of the
synchronous language SIGNAL to continuous-time dynamics made by Albert
Benveniste.
The first version of Scicos was entirely written in Scilab language by
R. Nikoukhah and had
no graphical editor. He later coded the simulator in fortran and parts of
the compiler in C for the first
official release in 1994, which included a graphical editor developed
primarily
by S. Steer. Scicos developed at a slow rate with the help of PhD
students, PostDocs
and interns until late 90’. The code generator was developed for
example by Rachid Djenidi
(PhD student) and
an optimized implementation of the compiler was realized by Azzedine
Azil (PhD student). Industrial partners
provided
application examples and even participated actively in the developments
(for
example Eric Demay from EDF).
Thanks to
R&D contracts, the development of Scicos accelerated considerably
after
2000. R. Nikoukhah developed a new
simulator in C
with the help of Masoud Najafi
(PhD student and later Metalau Engineer),
Scicos data
types were extended by Alan
Layec and later Metalau Engineer).
Modelica was introduced into Scicos thanks to open source compiler
developed by
Sebastien Furic
(currently
at LMS-Imagine); this work was realized with the help of S. Steer and
M. Najafi. The new Scilab graphic library
routines replaced
the old ones (no longer supported) in Scicos by Simone Mannori
(Metalau Engineer then), Benoit Bayol
(Intern) and S. Steer. S. Mannori also
developed
Hardware in the loop applications for Scicos. The book “Modeling
and Simulation in Scilab/Scicos” by Stephen
L.
Campbell, J. Ph. Chancelier and R. Nikoukhah played a key role in the promotion of
Scicos, so
did the Scicos
RTAI real-time
code generator
developed by Roberto
Bucher.
For the
release 4.1.2, R. Nikoukhah developed a
completely
new compiler algorithm and a multi-windows graphical editor. This
compiler was
used by A. Layec to redesign the code
generator. Scicos
is currently developed by the Scicos team (A. Layec,
M. Najafi, F. Nassif)
headed by R. Nikoukhah in collaboration
with outside
contributors in particular S. Furic and J.
Ph. Chancelier. Scicos adopted the GPL
license in 2008. A new
GPL Modelica compiler is being developed by S. Furic
and R. Nikoukhah.
Due to stability and performance problems with Scilab 5, Scicos is now
only developed in and for ScicosLab. The latest stable version, Scicos 4.3, is
released with the software package ScicosLab 4.3. This version contains
a new compiler developed in Ocaml.
Scicos 4.4 has been release with ScicosLab 4.4 beta in December 2009, which is
the subject of the new edition of the book on Modeling
and Simulation in Scilab/Scicos entitled Modeling and Simulation in Scilab/Scicos
with ScicosLab 4.4.
