Design and Implementation of a User Friendly OpenModelica Graphical Connection Editor

Abstract: OpenModelica (www.openmodelica.org) is an open-source Modelica-based modeling and simulation environment intended for industrial as well as academic usage. Its long-term development is supported by a non-profit organization – the Open Source Modelica Consortium OSMC, where Linköping University is a member.The main reason behind this thesis was the need for a user friendly, efficient and modular OpenModelica graphical connection editor. The already existing open source editors were either textual or not so user friendly. As a part of this thesis work a new open source Qt-based cross platform graphical user interface was designed and implemented, called OMEdit, partially based on an existing GUI for hydraulic systems, HOPSAN. The usage of Qt C++ libraries makes this tool more future safe and also allows it to be easily integrated into other parts of the OpenModelica platform.This thesis aims at developing an advanced open source user friendly graphical user interface that provides the users with easy-to-use model creation, connection editing, simulation of models, and plotting of results. The interface is extensible enough to support user-defined extensions/models. Models can be both textual and graphical. From the annotation information in the Modelica models (e.g. Modelica Standard Library components) a connection tree and diagrams can be created. The communication to the OpenModelica Compiler (OMC) Subsystem is performed through a Corba client-server interface. The OMC Corba server provides an interactive API interface. The connection editor will function as the front-end and OMC as the backend. OMEdit communicates with OMC through the interactive API interface, requests the model information and creates models/connection diagrams based on the Modelica annotations standard version 3.2.