A guide to the main reference literature for each component and feature of preCICE
Updated 11 Oct 24

The literature one can read to understand different aspects of preCICE may feel a bit overwhelming. This page aims to give some starting points and citation guidelines.

Apart from these resources, you may also wonder what else the preCICE team and community have published. In that case, please refer to the citations on Google Scholar (this is for the v1 paper, the v2 paper will be listed soon).

When to cite what

preCICE is made by academics: please cite us! 🤗

Even further, please cite all components you are using, next to the latest reference paper. Here are some guidelines:

preCICE in general

Talking about preCICE, at any level? Then, read and cite the latest preCICE reference paper:

preCICE v2: A sustainable and user-friendly coupling library [version 2; peer review: 2 approved]

Gerasimos Chourdakis, Kyle Davis, Benjamin Rodenberg, Miriam Schulte, Frédéric Simonis, Benjamin Uekermann et al., Open Research Europe, 2022, 2:51.

Publisher's site   Download BibTeX  

Talking specifically about preCICE v1? Then keep citing the preCICE v1 reference paper.

Adapters

Are you using any of the adapters? Then, please also read and cite the respective references. The following adapters currently have reference papers:

OpenFOAM-preCICE: Coupling OpenFOAM with External Solvers for Multi-Physics Simulations

Gerasimos Chourdakis, David Schneider, and Benjamin Uekermann, OpenFOAM® Journal, Volume 3, 2023.

Publisher's site   Download BibTeX  
FEniCS–preCICE: Coupling FEniCS to other simulation software

Benjamin Rodenberg, Ishaan Desai, Richard Hertrich, Alexander Jaust, Benjamin Uekermann, SoftwareX, Volume 16, Elsevier, 2021.

Publisher's site   Download BibTeX  

For the CalculiX, SU2, and code_aster adapters, as well as for the concept of an adapter, please read and cite this overview paper:

Official preCICE Adapters for Standard Open-Source Solvers

Benjamin Uekermann, Hans-Joachim Bungartz, Lucia Cheung Yau, Gerasimos Chourdakis, Alexander Rusch, Proceedings of the 7th GACM Colloquium on Computational Mechanics for Young Scientists from Academia, Volume , GACM, 2017.

Publisher's site   Download BibTeX  

Reproducibility

To ensure reproducibility of your results, you can use and cite the preCICE distribution. This frequently updated snapshot of the preCICE ecosystem includes versions of components that work together, while acknowledging everyone that has contributed to the respective version of any component.

Starting points

A very good first reading is the dissertations of the core preCICE developers:

  • Bernhard Gatzhammer introduced preCICE in his dissertation Efficient and Flexible Partitioned Simulation of Fluid-Structure Interactions (2014). Chapters 1-4 give a detailed introduction of most of the preCICE features and are still valid to a large extend. Start here for an explanation of the different coupling schemes, of the different communication methods, or of the data mapping techniques. Note that the “geometry interface” and “server mode” features have been removed.

  • Benjamin Uekermann introduced inter- and intra-solver parallelization in his dissertation Partitioned Fluid-Structure Interaction on Massively Parallel Systems (2016). Chapter 2 gives a compact introduction to preCICE. Furthermore, read here especially for the parallel coupling schemes, which allow a simultaneous execution of multiple solvers (Chapter 3) and the realization of all main features on distributed data (Chapter 4).

The list of completed dissertations also includes:

and the story continues by the current team.

preCICE features

Parallel and high-performance computing

Further components

The documentation pages of each adapter include guides to further literature. Apart from those resources, the proceedings paper “Official preCICE Adapters for Standard Open-Source Solvers” includes a first overview and describes the concept of an adapter, while the preCICE v2 reference paper gives a more updated and detailed overview of the preCICE ecosystem.