Automatic Model Generation for Virtual Commissioning of Specialized Production Machines

Actual challenges in production are individualization and short product lifecycles. To achieve this, the product development and the production planning must be accelerated. In some cases specialized production machines are engineered for automating production processes for a single product. Regarding the engineering of specialized production machines, there is often a sequential process starting with the mechanics, proceeding with the electrics and ending with the automation design. To accelerate this engineering process the different domains have to be parallelized as far as possible (Schlögl, 2008). Thereby the different domains start detailing in parallel after the definition of a common concept. The system integration follows the detailing with the objective to verify the system including the PLC-code. Regarding production machines, the system integration is done either by commissioning of the real machine or by validating the PLCcode against a model of the machine, so called virtual commissioning.