4 research outputs found
Improving transferability between different engineering stages in the development of automated material flow modules
For improving flexibility and robustness of the engineering of automated
production systems (aPS) in case of extending, reducing or modifying parts,
several approaches propose an encapsulation and clustering of related
functions, e.g. from the electrical, mechanical or software engineering, based
on a modular architecture. Considering the development of these modules, there
are different stages, e.g. module planning or functional engineering, which
have to be completed. A reference model that addresses the different stages for
the engineering of aPS is proposed by AutomationML. Due to these different
stages and the integration of several engineering disciplines, e.g. mechanical,
electrical/electronic or software engineering, information not limited to one
discipline are stored redundantly increasing the effort to transfer information
and the risk of inconsistency. Although, data formats for the storage and
exchange of plant engineering information exist, e.g. AutomationML, fixed
domain specific structures and relations of the information, e.g. for automated
material flow systems (aMFS), are missing. This paper presents the integration
of a meta model into the development of modules for aMFS to improve the
transferability and consistency of information between the different
engineering stages and the increasing level of detail from the coarse-grained
plant planning to the fine-grained functional engineering.Comment: 11 pages, https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/7499821
An approach to open virtual commissioning for component-based automation
Increasing market demands for highly customised products with shorter time-to-market and
at lower prices are forcing manufacturing systems to be built and operated in a more efficient
ways. In order to overcome some of the limitations in traditional methods of automation
system engineering, this thesis focuses on the creation of a new approach to Virtual
Commissioning (VC).
In current VC approaches, virtual models are driven by pre-programmed PLC control
software. These approaches are still time-consuming and heavily control expertise-reliant as
the required programming and debugging activities are mainly performed by control
engineers. Another current limitation is that virtual models validated during VC are difficult
to reuse due to a lack of tool-independent data models. Therefore, in order to maximise the
potential of VC, there is a need for new VC approaches and tools to address these limitations.
The main contributions of this research are: (1) to develop a new approach and the related
engineering tool functionality for directly deploying PLC control software based on
component-based VC models and reusable components; and (2) to build tool-independent
common data models for describing component-based virtual automation systems in order to
enable data reusability. [Continues.