The simulation tool SmartCalc.CTM (Fraunhofer ISE intern development) uses a set of XML files as its data source. These files contain data about Material properties of components of a photovoltaic module. The choice for XML files instead of a SQL database was motivated by the human readability and the possibility to give new files for new measured material properties to customers, who also run the software.


Problems with the existing procedure:
   • Difficult to implement consistently an additional tag in the XML files for changes in the simulation tool
   • Not possible to select a subset of XML-files with certain tag, in order to ship only these files to a customer