Towards an integrated simulation and virtual commissioning environment for controls of material handling systems

Abstract

Modern material handling systems (MHS) are complex systems which are controlled by various control units on different automation levels. The design of the MHS facility layout and the development of the control units require the application of different CAE tools but simulation and virtual commissioning does currently not play a significant role because there is no integrated simulation-based verification environment for all project stages and control levels available. This paper presents an approach towards an integrated simulation-based verification tool for all stages of an MHS project. During the first stage a material flow simulation of the plant model is conducted to analyze key performance indicators. This model is reused to test and verify the function of control units such as material flow controllers or programmable logic controllers. An automatic equivalence checking tool identifies differences between simulation runs. An important benefit: One common simulation model is used for all project stages

Hardware-in-the-Loop Mechatronic Virtual Prototyping of a high-speed capsule filling machine

“…In addition to the physics simplification, another hot topic for VC is the product flow modeling, which is fundamental to virtually reproduce the real commissioning tests. For example, in [15], the product flow is modeled with signals detected by light barriers sensors. Other researchers use commercially available GPU physic engines, from the to model the part flow along with the physics behaviors [16].…”

“…Other researchers use commercially available GPU physic engines, from the to model the part flow along with the physics behaviors [16]. Unfortunately, this powerful feature requires heavy computations that inhibit a real-time run when dealing with the fast cycle times used for high-speed pharmaceutical processing machines (as also pointed out by [15]). Therefore, real-time simulations can be achieved only via mathematical models specifically optimized for the case at hand, rather than through general-purpose software for dynamic simulations.…”

Consistent use of emulation across different stages of plant development — The case of deadlock avoidance for cyclic cut-to-size processes

“…In Meyer, Pöge, and Mayer (2012) the expansion of an existing simulation object library for the automotive industry to include emulation functionality is described. In that project the simulated plant is linked to the manufacturing execution system (MES) as well, whereas Seidel, Donath, and Haufe (2012) present an integrated simulation and virtual commissioning environment for controls of (intralogistics) material handling systems which comprises emulations not only connected to the upper level of a material flow controller (MFC) but also to the lower level of programmable logic controllers (PLC). The following section gives an explanation of the emulation approach used in our tool together with the different layers of the control system.…”

Virtual engineering framework for automatic generation of control logic including safety

“…Due to this issue, simulation and modeling engineers have to model complete behavior of the manufacturing system again to carry out virtual commissioning. And this is the typical case, even though by integrating virtual commissioning in the virtual engineering chain carries benefits as described by the authors of [1], [2]. This work has been carried out at the Wingquist Laboratory VINN Excellence Centre within the Production Area of Advance at Chalmers.…”