A template-based approach to support an automated digital production plant engineering

Nowadays, companies produce electrolyzers with a high manual effort. Main reasons for this manual production are a low demand as well as a high variance in the size and design of the electrolyzers. The sizes, for instance, can range from 19-inch racks up to 40-feet containers. Nevertheless, we can observe a trend towards the use of hydrogen. Of course, the increased use of hydrogen will raise the demand for electrolyzers, which in turn will cause a need for automated production. Although we can design an efficient production plant for a single type of electrolyzer, we need a solution for a large variety of electrolyzers. Starting with a specification of an arbitrary electrolyzer, the research project FertiRob aims to develop a generic method to derive an automated production plant. The method will work on a digital twin level. The input is a template of the electrolyzer while the output is a digital twin of the corresponding production plant. The latter twin will provide a sophisticated simulation that is used for succeeding methods, e.g., to validate the twin by means of a virtual commissioning or to optimize the production plant in terms of cycle time or required space. As it turns out, a main prerequisite for the method is a certain level of abstraction of the electrolyzer specification as well as of the production means. This paper will present the current approach for a possible abstraction. Thereby, we transfer the design pattern paradigm to the described problem of deriving a digital twin of a production plant. Design patterns are widely used in the domain of software development, and they provide a sufficient level of abstraction for both the electrolyzers and the production means.