Discerning Quantities from Units of Measurement

Steve McKeever

2022

Abstract

In scientific and engineering applications, physical quantities embodied as units of measurement (UoM) are frequently used. While managing units of measurement is a fairly mature topic in software engineering, more subtle metrological concepts such as named quantities have had little traction within the scientific programming community. The loss of the Mars climate orbiter, attributed to a confusion between the metric and imperial unit systems, popularised the disastrous consequences of incorrectly handling measurement values. This has led to the development of a large number of libraries, languages and tools to ensure developers can specify and validate UoM information in their designs and codes. However these systems do not differentiate between quantities and dimensions. For instance torque and work, which share the same UoM, can not be interchanged because they do not represent the same entity. We present a named quantity layer that sits on top of a dimension checker and unit converter ensuring values of different quantities are correctly managed without undue restrictions. Our quantity algebra works alongside the unit dimensions to ensure we maintain named quantities when we perform arithmetic and function calls.

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

McKeever S. (2022). Discerning Quantities from Units of Measurement. In Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Model-Driven Engineering and Software Development - Volume 1: MODELSWARD, ISBN 978-989-758-550-0, pages 105-115. DOI: 10.5220/0010971300003119

in Bibtex Style

@conference{modelsward22,
author={Steve McKeever},
title={Discerning Quantities from Units of Measurement},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Model-Driven Engineering and Software Development - Volume 1: MODELSWARD,},
year={2022},
pages={105-115},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0010971300003119},
isbn={978-989-758-550-0},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF

JO - Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Model-Driven Engineering and Software Development - Volume 1: MODELSWARD,
TI - Discerning Quantities from Units of Measurement
SN - 978-989-758-550-0
AU - McKeever S.
PY - 2022
SP - 105
EP - 115
DO - 10.5220/0010971300003119