VORtech Blog

The Pi-dag challenge 2023 has three very convincing winners. It was clearly a nice challenge for software engineers with a knack for mathematics. There were some very interesting and surprising solutions. Some made creative use of loopholes in the rules, but all displayed true coding skill.

The 2023 edition in Amsterdam offered a showcase of everything that is going on in the field, from software management, digital twins, and machine learning to impressive applications.

For all scientific programmers out there that enjoy a solid challenge: submit your Python solution for the Pi-day challenge 2023 on April 20 at the latest.

In many companies, the workflow around simulations is a highly manual and error-prone process. Automating a simulation workflow saves time and effort. Moreover, it makes the process far more reliable, and it opens new possibilities.

Model-order reduction is a powerful technique to speed up simulations. It can be used to solve performance issues in applications like design optimization, model-based predictive control, or digital twinning. In this blog, we’ll give a very basic introduction to these techniques and describe some experiments that were done at VORtech by two interns at VORtech, Floris Roodenburg and Abinash Mishra. They could speed up calculations by more than a factor of ten.

There have been many positive developments on the personnel front in the past year. For example, we have welcomed a host of new colleagues and some senior employees are preparing to become partners. We celebrate a series of working jubileesies. We said goodbye to a few colleagues, but that is a natural process in a larger team. Because many of our relations have a personal connection with our colleagues, we thought it good to give an overview of the developments.

How can machine learning be used to optimize production processes with data from machines? And how to approach this? This whitepaper offers a step-by-step plan.

Building a specialized information system not only requires a developer with domain knowledge, but also a good collaboration between the user and the developer. In this blog, we show how this works in practice, illustrated with examples from a system for monitoring the Dutch coastal waters.

In the simulation of physical processes, some important physical property may get lost due to the computational method. For example, energy loss can be introduced in a simulation of a process that is not supposed to lose energy. Recently, we published new computational methods that avoid such problems. These conservative discretizations conserve certain physical quantities like mass, momentum, and energy. Or all at the same time. This means that our methods make simulations more accurate and more reliable.

Sphinx is a documentation tool for software projects that can create easily searchable HTML pages and excellent PDFs. It is well suited for documenting scientific code bases due to its support for LaTeX-style equations and numerous extensions for plots, diagrams and much more. It would be nice if we could integrate Sphinx with the common build system CMake so that we can automatically generate documentation. This blog describes an approach to do just that.