# Model structure¶

The core of a myokit model is a set of variables and the equations that define them. For convenience, variables are grouped together in components. Variables, in turn, can have nested variables of their own, hidden from the rest of the model to avoid cluttering up the namespace.

Myokit was built to solve ODE systems: it assumes the current state of a model can be accuratly described using a set of variables - the state - and a set of equations describing the derivatives of these state variables.

As a result, a variable in myokit can have one of three characters:

1. A state variable. This variable is defined by the equation for its derivative and an initial (or current) value stored in the Model class itself. The value of a state variable is updated by the ODE solving routine at each iteration.

A state variable may never be nested.

2. A (physical) constant or parameter. These are variables whose value does not change during the course of a simulation. Myokit determines these values implicitly, by inspecting the variables defining equations.

3. Values that aren’t states or constants are called intermediate values. For example, in a typical cardiac cell model all currents are intermediate values. Myocyte models are slightly unusual in that most state variables are of little interest compared to the intermediate values.

To communicate with the outside world (e.g. the simulation engine), variables can be bound to external inputs. For example, explicit time dependence can be implemented by binding a variable to the value “time” This variable is then updated by the simulation engine to have the correct value at every simulation step.

## Defining equations¶

A variable in myokit has one or more defining equations: State variables define a time derivative and an initial value, all other variables define a value.

# State variable, two defining equations
x = 1
dot(x) = 0.5 * sqrt(x)

# Ordinary variable, defined directly
y = 4 * x


## Names, qnames and unames¶

Each component or variable has a name that should start with an ascii letter (a-zA-Z) and contain only alphanumerical characters or underscores (a-ZA-Z0-9_).

A fully qualified name (or simply qname) lists the name of a variable including all its parents’ names, until a component is reached. For example, the variable V in the component membrane has qname membrane.V. Similarly, a nested variable alpha belonging to m in the component ina has qname ina.m.alpha.

To facilitate the generation of source code in various languages, a uname is created for all variables whenever a model is generated. This name does not contain any periods (.) and is guaranteed to be unique within the model.

To avoid conflicts between unames and language keywords a function Model.reserve_unique_names() is defined. Any keywords reserved using this function will not appear as unames.