Optimica Testing Toolkits - Automated Testing Framework

Optimica Testing Toolkit is a tool-independent framework developed by Modelon for performing automatic testing on Modelica models. It's functionality supports both static and script-based testing.

Static testing is used to perform predefined tests on a subset of models in a library. During static testing, the user provides the specific library as well as a criteria for selecting which models to include in the test. Each model is then automatically compiled and simulated and the resulting trajectories are compared to reference trajectories.

Script-based testing enables the test author to write finely tuned tests that interact with the compilation and simulation process and to test individual models with specific compiler and simulator scenarios.Optimica Testing Toolkit supports cross-tool testing with several different Modelica compilers and simulation environments using FMI.

The purpose of Optimica Testing Toolkit is to provide a testing pipeline that is tool agnostic. Optimica Testing Toolkit provides the same testing pipeline regardless of what compiler and simulator performs the actual model compilation and simulation. Tool agnosticism is provided by means of an abstraction layer between Optimica Testing Toolkit and the actual tools. Each tool is hooked into the abstraction layer via a plugin tailored specifically to that tool.

As part of the development cycle a Graphical User Interface was developed.The GUI can be used for test authoring, test configuration and test execution. One important aspect considered during development was to ensure that the GUI had good usability. We used a number of different user studies together with the users in order to discover usability problems, and then used iterative development to address and fix those issues.

Optimica Testing Toolkit was initialy developed by Modelon as an inhouse tool for performing library testing and verification using several Modelica tools. It has since been extended with the GUI and other features and is now provided and maintained as a commercial product by Modelon.