*2.2. Functional Mockup Interface*

FMI is a software standard to facilitate co-simulation approaches in complex simulation tasks involving several domains. The basic idea of FMI within a co-simulation is to integrate two or more simulation tools into a common simulation environment. The data exchange takes place at defined communication times. In the time between the communication points, the tools simulate their models independently of each other. A component that has implemented the FMI standard is called an FMU. The FMU is a compressed archive file (\*.fmu) containing a model description and the corresponding libraries (\*.dll). For more information, see [17,19] or www.fmi.org.
