The OpenModelica Integrated Environment for Modeling, Simulation, and Model-Based Development

• Main Authors: Peter Fritzson, Adrian Pop, Karim Abdelhak, Adeel Ashgar, Bernhard Bachmann, Willi Braun, Daniel Bouskela, Robert Braun, Lena Buffoni, Francesco Casella, Rodrigo Castro, Rüdiger Franke, Dag Fritzson, Mahder Gebremedhin, Andreas Heuermann, Bernt Lie, Alachew Mengist, Lars Mikelsons, Kannan Moudgalya, Lennart Ochel, Arunkumar Palanisamy, Vitalij Ruge, Wladimir Schamai, Martin Sjölund, Bernhard Thiele, John Tinnerholm, Per Östlund
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Norwegian Society of Automatic Control 2020-10-01
• Series: Modeling, Identification and Control
• Subjects: modelica; openmodelica; metamodelica; fmi; modeling; simulation; optimization; development; environment; numeric; symbolic; compilation; embedded system; real-time
• Online Access: http://www.mic-journal.no/PDF/2020/MIC-2020-4-1.pdf

OpenModelica is a unique large-scale integrated open-source Modelica- and FMI-based modeling, simulation, optimization, model-based analysis and development environment. Moreover, the OpenModelica environment provides a number of facilities such as debugging; optimization; visualization and 3D animation; web-based model editing and simulation; scripting from Modelica, Python, Julia, and Matlab; efficient simulation and co-simulation of FMI-based models; compilation for embedded systems; Modelica-UML integration; requirement verification; and generation of parallel code for multi-core architectures. The environment is based on the equation-based object-oriented Modelica language and currently uses the MetaModelica extended version of Modelica for its model compiler implementation. This overview paper gives an up-to-date description of the capabilities of the system, short overviews of used open source symbolic and numeric algorithms with pointers to published literature, tool integration aspects, some lessons learned, and the main vision behind its development.