Virtual Commissioning of Industrial Control Systems - a 3D Digital Model Approach

With the growing presence of industry 4.0, flexible workstations and distributed control logic, software development has become an even more important part of the automation engineering process than before. In a traditional workflow, the main commissioning part of industrial control systems is performed on the real set-up and consequently during a time critical phase of the project. Virtual commissioning can be used to reduce the real commissioning time and can allow an earlier commissioning start, reducing the overall project lead time, risk of damaging parts, amount of rework and cost of error correction. Previous research showed already a reduction potential of the real commissioning time by 73%, when using a virtual commissioning strategy based on a 3D digital model. However, the robustness of that approach still highly depends on the human expertise to fully evaluate the correct behavior in all possible use scenarios. This paper describes an approach to further automate these virtual commissioning steps by embedding functional specifications and use scenarios through a formal notation inside the 3D digital model. Configuration steps inside the virtual environment describe the conditions, independent from the control logic but related to component states and transitions in the digital model (actuator and sensor values, time restrictions, counters, positions of objects, etc.). These conditions are continuously monitored during an extensive commissioning run of the digital model covering all possible component states and transitions. A small scale experiment will show the reduction of the virtual commissioning time and earlier detection of quality issues.