physical simulation: design thoughts

Question

I'm an applied physics student and currently working on a simulation of the magnetic interactions of multiple protons within a protein.

Me having only little experience with programming and almost none with OOP, there is a lot of information for me to process. Especially in terms on how to design my model in a way that is flexible and can be expanded easily later on.

So far, I've been working on my class diagram. My approach was to create a physObject class that implements different behaviour-interfaces. So in my case, all Protons will implement the MagneticBaheviour interface.

I've tried keeping my design as loosely coupled as possible for it to reusable. So later on someone might add i.e. a GravitationalBehaviour to simulate the gravitational behaviour of physical objects.

So this is my current sketch of my class diagram. However I'm unsatisfied with some connections, and I'm not sure how to visualize my complex system in an uml diagramm. I.e. for the calculation of the ActingBField I'll need information on the distances to other physObjects. Also each time i.e. the location of a physObject changes, the ActingBField has to be calculated on every existing physObject again.

In addition, having an acting magnetic field on a physObject that has MagneticBehaviour would result in the call of BlochEquations, therefore resulting in a change of Magnetization, resulting in a new calculation of ActingBField. You get the idea.

So my system includes a lot of recursive patterns and the objects need to be able to pass needed information automatically when the value of an specific object changes.

My first approach was to use an Observer pattern, making my physObject an Observable and each Behaviour-interface being an Observer. However I also read posts to event-/ case-/ state-driven programming. This also sounds like it would fit my problem, but I dont know which one to apply for a simulation. I guess I could somehow define a call condition to some methods, I have no idea how to even visualize that design though.

Last but not least, all I've been doing so far is focus on the physical model of the simulation. However for this simulation to be usable, I figured I'll need to find a way to connect this model to some kind of user, that i.e. sets the time period of the simulation or selects which data to look at.

How would I visualize that using a uml diagram? What concepts do I need to consider or completely forgot about?

Im happy for any help in the right direction and I'm grateful for anyone that made it so far. Thanks for reading ^^

Answer 1

I would consider first principles before going down the rabbit-hole of OO modelling.

Best approach

It seems to me you have a room, a list of items in the room, and some values associated with each item (including a 3D position, so three numbers, and some sort of magnetisation value). You probably don't need to represent the room - just start with the list of items.

Now, for a small number of items, you can draw that easily enough on a blackboard. What are you trying to simulate? Is it the movement of each item in space under mutual magnetic forces? If we assume stepping forward in time by say 1 second, how would you calculate on paper the changes in positions due to magnetic forces? Write that algorithm down.

The computer can now be programmed to do these calculations for a larger number of items, and a larger number of steps of time, than you would wish to do by hand.

Other points on OOP

The primary industrial application of object-oriented programming, which is actually found effective, is to allow teams consisting of far more than one person (often thousands of people in different companies) to write interacting software components.

Twenty or thirty years ago, there was a lot of broader hype about how OOP was supposed to be about modelling the "real world". In reality, this approach most often just leads to simpleton models of the real world which aren't real at all, but also (paradoxically) extremely complicated and poorly integrated programs.

What you are trying to do with the computer is not to simulate the physical world, it is to automate a process of calculation, to produce a set of numbers that represent the state of the physical world at different moments in time.

Once you have the numbers calculated, they can be graphed and animated by the computer, in the same way that producing a graph on paper starts with calculating the numbers, and how a flip-book of graphs starts with drawing each individual graph.

Answer 2

So it has been a while since my question and since then I have adapted my design. So here is what I came up with:

The particle properties are now clearer and all the calculations will happen in my PhysicsSystems. The PhysicsWorld will keep track of all the PhysicsSystems and run the update()-method once every timestep of the simulation.