Engine plugins provide the capability for users to incorporate customer-specific nongeneric modeling into computations. A plugin component is a user-supplied software component called by the application at certain predefined event times within the computation cycle. The plugin is allowed to modify the computation by adding additional considerations or modifying parameters. STK offers specific plugin points for most computations. The interfaces and information available to plugins depend on the particular plugin point.
You can use Engine plugins both with STK and with STK Engine custom applications. To extend or customize an STK computation, depending on the STK module or technology involved, you can use an environment that supports implementation of COM interfaces (.Net, C#, C++, VBScript, etc.)--COM based engine plugins, a scripting environment limited to MATLAB or VBScript--engine plugin scripts, or both.
Using plugins you can add modeling capabilities that are not available out of the box, which may be necessary when the STK generic models are insufficient for solving a very specific problem. Being able to extend STK's existing computational framework means that you only need to code the custom part of the model. You may want to see the Plugin Advantage or the Plugin Example help topics for more information.