  The High Resolution Imager (HRI_EUV) telescope of the Extreme Ultraviolet
Imager (EUI) instrument onboard Solar Orbiter has observed EUV brightenings,
so-called campfires, as fine-scale structures at coronal temperatures. The goal
of this paper is to compare the basic geometrical (size, orientation) and
physical (intensity, lifetime) properties of the EUV brightenings with regions
of energy dissipation in a non-potential coronal magnetic field simulation. In
the simulation, HMI line-of-sight magnetograms are used as input to drive the
evolution of solar coronal magnetic fields and energy dissipation. We applied
an automatic EUV brightening detection method to EUV images obtained on 30 May
2020 by the HRI_EUV telescope. We applied the same detection method to the
simulated energy dissipation maps from the non-potential simulation to detect
simulated brightenings. We detected EUV brightenings with density of
1.41x10^{-3} brightenings/Mm^2 in the EUI observations and simulated
brightenings between 2.76x10^{-2} - 4.14x10^{-2} brightenings/Mm^2 in the
simulation, for the same time range. Although significantly more brightenings
were produced in the simulations, the results show similar distributions of the
key geometrical and physical properties of the observed and simulated
brightenings. We conclude that the non-potential simulation can successfully
reproduce statistically the characteristic properties of the EUV brightenings
(typically with more than 85% similarity); only the duration of the events is
significantly different between observations and simulation. Further
investigations based on high-cadence and high-resolution magnetograms from
Solar Orbiter are under consideration to improve the agreement between
observation and simulation.
