Computations without the Compart detour

Those who followed the newsletters of the past years will have noticed that PIAS has seriously been revised and modernized.

An important topic in this process has been the replacement of Compart with the Layout module. However, PIAS modules using compartment data were still based on the Compart data format, so Layout stored the compartment data both in native Layout format, as well as in Compart format. For the user this was invisible, so as such it was no real objection, but this duality obstructs further software developments. For this reason, all modules of PIAS have been adapted to native Layout format. This new software has been in use within SARC for some time, and has been intensively tested, so we consider it now to be the time for a general release. Actually, you will not see any change in operation of PIAS, although compart-related computations (such as damage stability) might occasionally give marginally different results with the new software. Please be assured that, thanks to the enhanced compartment definition method of Layout, differences — if they occur at all — will be in the direction of increased accuracy.

Compart has been removed from the set of PIAS modules. An act that we will perform with some melancholy because this piece of software has since 1985 served thousands of PIAS users with modelling and computations of an estimated million tanks, holds and spaces.