MEA Q1 2018

10 MEA MARKETS / Q1 2018 , OpenModelica is an open-source industrial-strengthmodelling and simulation environment intended for industrial and academic usage. Its long-termdevelopment is supported by a non-profit organisation – the Open SourceModelica Consortium (OSMC). We spoke to Peter Fritzson, Director of the OSMC and director of theMODPROD Center forModel-based Development at Linköping University, Sweden, who gives us an interesting overview of the company and its overall mission. A Future-Proof Product OSMC is a non-profit, non-governmental organisation with the aim of developing, maintaining, supporting, and promoting the OpenModelica open- source implementation of the Modelica language, of the FMI standard, and the OpenModelica associated open-source tools and libraries. Peter goes into detail about the product that he and the team are working on, and why he believes the product is so valuable. “Our product is called OpenModelica, it is the most complete open-source Modelica and FMI-based modelling, simulation, and optimisation environment available. It is intended for both industrial and academic usage. Modelica is an industrial-strength standard multi- domain language and technology for modelling and simulation in many application areas; FMI is a standard for model-exchange supported by more than 100 tool vendors world-wide. “Interestingly, a strong trend in engineering is currently the increased complexity and increased software fraction of industrial products, as well as demands on shorter time- to-market. A viable approach to handle these challenges is to switch to model-based development, where a product is modelled in a computer making it possible to simulate and test its behaviour even before it has been built. This enables faster development, early testing, and higher quality since problems can be found and corrected before manufacture.” Having given us an overview of the OpenModelica product, Peter explains that OpenModelica is available and the benefits the product brings, along with membership of OSMC. “OpenModelica is available for commercial and non-commercial usage under the conditions of the OSMC Public License (OSMC- PL) or GPL. The OSMC-PL is an option which is exclusively available for consortium members and allows to combine the source code with company confidential proprietary code that can be included in products shipped to customers. “OSMC membership gives influence on OpenModelica development priorities, often strengthens joint research project applications, and potentially improves support for OpenModelica-based developments by a member due to higher priority access to the core development team.” A sign of the extreme benefits which companies would feel from utilising the OpenModelica product is that it is already used by many companies including ABB, Siemens, Bosch-Rexroth, EDF, RTE, SKF, VTT, in the MIKE West Water Quality product from DHI, and being integrated in products from Equa Simulation AB, Dynamica, TLK-Thermo, etc., as well as being used at many universities and research institutes. However, there are many more aspects of the OpenModelica project which Peter is keen to highlight, including development, creation and research. “There are many aspects of the OpenModelica project which are important, including the development and long-term support of an open source industrial-strength Modelica modelling and simulation environment for industrial and academic usage, supporting the Modelica standard libraries and other libraries, FMI, advanced applications, as well as Modelica and Python scripting. “Furthermore, the creation of a highly compliant complete reference implementation of Modelica in an extended version of Modelica itself. Promoting a model-centric approach that gives the modeler increased control, including modelling of both hardware- and software components in complex systems. “Additionally, OpenModelica offers improved implementation techniques which enhance the performance of compiled Modelica code by generating code for parallel hardware. It also enables research in areas such as language design, control system design, FMI, optimisation, debugging, embedded system modelling and HIL simulation, multi-core code generation, new symbolic and numerical algorithms, and many more. Alongside its excellent products, OMSC provides flexibility for its customers and users, avoiding the vendor-lock-in which is usually forced by competing proprietary products. Peter believes this is an important aspect of the company’s services, and he goes on to describe what measures he takes in order to ensure that the firm is at the forefront of any emerging developments and trends. “Adapting to the ever evolving needs of the technology industry, we have an active research team. Working with open sources makes it possible to quickly adapt to new technologies and trends, both for ourselves and our customers.” Regarding what the future holds for OSMC, Peter is keen to explain that the team is expanding the consortium, and inviting more companies, universities, and research institutes to join. 1711ME05