A Proposal of a Mathematical Roadmap for Scilab DRAFT - Projects

UseCasesAutomotiveIndustryAerospace?ChemistryFinance...LinearAlgebraODEsOptimizationStatistics...ComputationalFeaturesFigure 1: The two dimensions of Scilab : features and use cases.• new features or an update of existing ones.Indeed, it may happen that existing features have performance or accuracy limitations.In some cases, existing features are not allowing to completely solve aparticular use case.This situation is presented in the figure 2, where the round shapes represent theareas defined by existing features, the ”U” symbols represent existing features andthe question marks ”?” represent the new features to be created.The need for update comes in two flavors : sometimes only a part of the featureis to be updated, while sometimes the whole component is to be replaced. Forexample, the ODE solver in Scilab is based on OdePack, which is efficient, butmay be completely replaced by the up-to-date Sun Dials library. In some cases,there a complete domain which is not covered by Scilab. For example, there iscurrently no component to solve systems of partial differential equations associatedwith conservation laws (that is, non linear hyperbolic systems). In some other cases,there are existing features which are almost completely filling a domain, but notexactly. For example, Scilab provide iterative sparse linear algebra solvers, but notthe associated preconditionners. There may be situations where there are a smallnumber of existing features which fills basic situations, but more advanced needs areunsatisfied. For example, the current statistics features are existing in Scilab, butthere are many more advanced statistics features which are missing.6