Within the European economy, digital modelling activities and the simulation of human motion in particular, have emerged during the last decades in various domains ranging from automotive and truck over healthcare, construction and pedestrian simulation to the gaming industry. Even though differing in their respective scope, the ability to realistically predict real-world observations has shown to be a key technology in order to remain competitive. For mechanical and mechatronic components, this trend is already covered by various research projects related to smart factories. In contrast, the generation of a rich repertoire of realistic human motions in complex and possibly highly collision afflicted environments is not sufficiently addressed by commercial tools, yet. Moreover, complex process workflows with an exhaustive number of possible manual task sequences can only be partly addressed today, since process variants have to be modelled by hand. As manual modelling is inevitably linked with additional effort, the potential cost reduction is significant. In order to introduce approaches and software solutions, which are capable to automatically simulating a rich repertoire of realistic human motions, MOSIM aims to develop and implement a generic concept which is inspired by the Functional Mock-up Interface (FMI) standard. MOSIM transfers the idea of co-simulating models from different simulation environments to the field of human simulation by means of introducing the Motion Model Units (MMU).


To achieve the mentioned goals, three main approaches, each incorporating various technical contributions which clearly go beyond the state of technology, will be explored within MOSIM:


  • Concept and Implementation of an extensive library consisting of MMUs encapsulating various human motions regardless of the respective use-case.
  • Development of tailored approaches, enabling autonomous generation of plausible MMU sequences and context-dependent decision-making using recent AI methods.
  • Unifying both approaches, a co-simulator will be implemented, generating natural and continuous human motions by sequencing and executing the obtained set of MMUs using generic transition models.


Using these three major concepts, a broad spectrum heterogeneous use-cases can be simulated. In order to underline the overall performance of this generic approach, MOSIM will address seven independent use-cases originating from five different countries (i.e. Germany, Sweden, Canada, Finland and France):


1. Production planning of passenger cars

2. Production planning of trucks

3. Construction planning and analysis

4. Healthcare: Surgery simulation

5. Character animation system

6. Pedestrian simulation

7. Factory virtualization



The project partners anticipate that the MOSIM project will lead to the following major generic technical outcomes:


  1. MMI Extension of the FMI standard.
  2. Library of MMUs.
  3. Algorithms and approaches for automatically deriving plausible MMU sequences.
  4. Algorithms and approaches for transforming the MMU sequence into continuous and realistic human motion.




MOSIM is an ITEA 3 project focusing on Modular Simulation of Natural Human Motions. The project runs from 2018-09-01

to 2021-08-31.



Dr. Philipp Agethen

Daimler AB


Dr. Thomas Bär

Daimler AB