The interdisciplinary development of smart factories and cyber-physical systems CPS shows the weaknesses of classical development methods. For example, the communication of the interdisciplinary participants in the development process of CPS is difficult due to a lack of cross-domain language comprehension. At the same time, the functional complexity of the systems to be developed increases and they act operationally as independent CPSs. And it is not only the product that needs to be developed, but also the manufacturing processes are complex. The use of graph-based design languages offers a technical solution to these challenges. The UML-based structures offer a cross-domain language understanding for all those involved in the interdisciplinary development process. Simulations are required for the rapid and successful development of new products. Depending on the functional scope, graphical simulations of the production equipment are used to simulate the manufacturing processes as a digital factory or a virtual commissioning simulation. Due to the high number of functional changes during the development process, it makes sense to automatically generate the simulation modelling as digital twins of the products or means of production from the graph-based design languages. The paper describes how digital twins are automatically generated using AutomationML according to the Reference Architecture Model Industry 4.0 (RAMI 4.0) or the Industrial Internet Reference Architecture (IIRA).
In innovative industrial companies, collaboration techniques and laboratories have been in use for years. What historically started with teleconferencing instead of business trips has now reached the status of normal tools for interdisciplinary cooperation in these companies with advances in technologies such as PCs and data broadband as well as software such as Computer Aided Design (CAD), Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR). But the collaboration techniques are often installed in extra rooms, e.g. video conferencing facilities and large VR laboratories. Other technologies such as chat programs can be used by any employee directly at his workplace. Without the use of these techniques, the short development times required today in many industrial sectors cannot be achieved and even remote maintenance of machines at the customer’s would be impossible for machine manufacturers. Within a research project, digital collaboration techniques are inspected and evaluated regarding their suitability for interdisciplinary cooperation in various applications. Collaboration techniques include special hardware for graphic simulations and head-mounted displays for 360∘ visualization of digital objects. Additionally different software for cooperation with graphics, video and conference programs distributed over several locations is tested, evaluated and partly newly developed. The application cases are processes from engineering and for planning of buildings. Based on the requirements determined during the tests, a new user-friendly mobile collaboration environment was developed. This collaboration environment integrates the different technologies of graphic simulation as well as already established methods such as video transmission or video conferencing and chat programs in a suitcase system.
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