# Smart Grid Testing Management Platform (SGTMP) +
## 1 Introduction  
Traditional power grids distributed and managed energy from a centralized system in one direction, from the energy provider to the customers [1]. With growing demands for reliability and efficiency of the grid operation, there has been a necessity to develop a more interactive, interconnected, and dynamic grid model [2]. As a result, smart grids (SGs) improve electricity management by involving advanced two-way communications and operational capabilities, which allow one to deliver electricity in a more efficient, reliable, sustainable, and safer way [3; 4]. The SG technology regulates smart devices at consumers' home and buildings with the aim to save energy and decrease costs [5].  
Software testing plays a relevant and significant role in today's society, to provide reliable and safer systems [6; 7; 8]. However, testing in the context of SGs is extremely complex due to the multi-layer structure of the overall infrastructure. Many layers need to coexist, each one responsible for different areas such as communication protocols, information exchange, and service provision [9]. Each of these layers has to be tested separately and as a whole system to ensure faultless and reliable energy supply [10]. Furthermore, the nature of SGs as a cyber-physical system involves integration with hardware devices, making use of modeling and simulations highly relevant to discovering integration issues at scale [11; 12].  
Many SG testing/simulation platforms have emerged over the years, focusing on simulating part of the complexity within SGs, both at the power and at the communication network level [13]:Smart GridLab [14], GridSim [15], Smart-Grid Common Open Research Emulator (SCORE) [16], Smart Grid Testbed [17], and GridLAB-D [18] are some of the main platforms available. In general terms, the main goal of such platforms is to provide researchers with instruments necessary to aid in a more reliable comparison of solution designs in the context of the SG infrastructure, be it communication-, hardware-, or software-related. All these platforms have the ultimate goal to provide a common testbed for SG implementation capabilities, with the main understanding that the complexity of SG modeling calls for so-called \"co-simulations\": the evaluation of multiple independent simulations integrated using a software interface [13].  
The goal of this paper is to present the implementation details, experiences, and open issues derived from the development of a platform, a smart grid testing management platform (herein referred to as SGTMP), that can support SG devices and hardware-in-the-loop testing and simulations. SGTMP supports test management, test execution, co-simulations of hardware-software components, test monitoring, and reporting. The platform is focused on closing the gap in current co-simulation research as discussed in [PERSON] et al. [19], regarding the provision of a configurable, GUI-supported environment to support cyber-physical systems testing and modeling. SGTMP is a Java-based web-application with a supporting REST API that can allow one to manage tests and run hardware/software simulations.  
The article is structured as follows. In Section 2, we explain the SG concept and the requirements for an SG testing environment, together with the support of a testing process. The architecture and implementation of SGTMP are discussed in Section 3, with details about the integration of testing and co-simulations, supported by the Mosaik framework [20; 21]. Section 4 proposes a deployment scenario to demonstrate a practical application of the platform for SG components stress testing. Section 5 includes the conclusions and future works.