Introduction

The Key4hep project aims at creating a complete software stack for detector optimisation and performance studies for future experiments. All major future collider groups: CEPC, CLIC, FCC and ILC are actively contributing to Key4hep and have started to develop migration schemes to move their software tools to key4hep eventually.

Key4hep is to a large extend build on the positive experience with iLCSoft, jointly developed by ILC and CLIC and uses some of the core tools used in iLCSoft, such as DD4hep and PandoraPFA.

The SFT group actively contributes to key4hep and in particular to the event data model toolkit PODIO and the new common event data model EDM4hep.

PODIO and EDM4hep

PODIO is an event data model toolkit that allows to efficiently create the C++ code for streaming of event data from simple yaml files. It is based on the idea of using Plain Old Data (POD) objects wherever possible to optimize the streaming performance. It provides I/O implementations based on ROOT and SIO.

The EDM4hep project aims to design the common event data model for the Key4hep project and is generated via the PODIO toolkit. It is largely based on the LCIO event data model that has been used successfully in the linear collider community for more than 15 years.