Towards a holistic methodology of efficient virtual preparation and commissioning for production systems

The industry elaborates on the possibilities of applying virtual engineering work to excel in production system development. For example, Virtual Commissioning as a concept for testing and validating system performance in advance of on-site commissioning has proven beneficial in multiple areas of development. Some areas include reducing on-site commissioning time, guaranteeing functional behavior, and removing potential errors, resulting in a smoother integration of new and upgraded systems.Nevertheless, it has been hard to prove the financial benefits and actual gain from VC compared to the more trusted traditional methods. The lack of standards mixed with the increasing complexity of systems and experience from prior attempts is one of many reasons.This thesis has identified different vital areas crucial for adopting virtual elements into the value chain of the development process within the automotive industry. It is of the highest importance to understand the prerequisites of a project’s ability to integrate virtual preparation for efficient commissioning and further break down the technical requirements of modeling and simulation in a multidisciplinary digital architecture.With more quantified data and insight from Virtual Commissioning attempts, it is possible to adopt knowledge to future projects and find ways to increase the utilization of the invested virtual engineering work.The thesis investigates the challenges of implementing virtual preparational methods for efficient commissioning to achieve flawless launches for all implementation projects of production systems. In addition, the research aims to find ways to increase the utilization of the constructed models, decrease the cost of virtual development and testing, and verify functionality and accuracy for optimal levels of simulation

A standardization approach to Virtual Commissioning strategies in complex production environments

The ongoing industrial revolution puts high demands on the component manufacturers and suppliers to meet the tough requirements set by the development industries to follow the technological advancement of highly digitalized factories with more future-oriented applications as Virtual Commissioning for cyber-physical systems. This paper provides a production system lifecycle assessment regarding the technical specification strategies using Virtual Commissioning for implementation and integration of new systems or plants and its predicted future challenges. With the use of standards and a common language practice between a purchaser/contractor procurement situation and across the different technical disciplines internally and externally, the implementation strategies is reiterated to achieve a new sustainable business model. The paper investigates different types of production systems and how a defined classification framework of different levels of Virtual Commissioning can connect the implementation requirements to a desired solution. This strategy includes aspects of standardization, communication, process lifecycle, and predicted cost parameters

A framework concept for data visualization and structuring in a complex production process

This paper provides a concept study for a visual interface framework together with the software Sequence Planner for implementation on a complex industrial process for extracting process information in an efficient way and how to make use of a lot of data to visualize it in a standardized human machine interface for different user perspectives. The concept is tested and validated on a smaller simulation of a paint booth with several interconnected and supporting control systems to prove the functionality and usefulness in this kind of production system.The paper presents the resulting five abstraction levels in the framework concept, from a production top view down to the signal exchange between the different resources in one production cell, together with additional features. The simulation proves the setup with Sequence Planner and the visual interface to work by extract and present process data from a running sequence

Modular Virtual Preparation method of production systems using a Digital Twin architecture

Even though virtual engineering and preparational work within the automotive industry has become more widely used over the last years with its possibilities to improve software quality and reduce physical commissioning time, it is still a costly investment for most companies when implementing or upgrading production systems. The different approaches and key factors to reduce the costs are to investigate how to reduce the development time of modeling and which practice or standard is most suitable for a certain application. A developer needs to expand the utilization of the virtual work and the re-usability of its digital models, in addition, to find a balance of the required level of modeling details according to the required functionality. This paper presents a framework with a modular software setup that simulates a 3-DOF robot in three different cases with different levels of detail. The outcome of the cases is evaluated in the context of functionality, usefulness, and affordability. The paper further discusses and explores potential use in regards to the concept of Virtual Commissioning and Digital Twin

Virtual Reality Commissioning in Production Systems Preparation

Virtual commissioning (VC) is a method used to virtually visualize and test production systems, control logic and material flows. The focus of this paper is to further extend this concept using Virtual Reality (VR). The introduction of VR in VC enhances the concept by adding a more realistic visualization and movement tracking which extends the possibilities of its validation. The changes to the validation aspect are mainly due to the fact that it is now possible to interact with the running virtual production in a realistic and intuitive way. The interaction gives designers and operators a new possibility to go from being observers to actors in the design phase. They are now able to validate the production system, test security protocols and validate the human interaction with the system, using VR

Cognitive Ability Evaluation using Virtual Reality and Eye Tracking

This work aims to create a virtual reality (VR) representation of Ravens progressive matrices (RPM) and apply available eye tracking (ET) technology to determine where the test person\u27s eye gaze is located during the test. RPM are developed to evaluate abstract reasoning and there is a possibility to further understand the mental processes of the test person by adding ET. The result of this project is a test scenario where the user completes ten tasks from RPM in a VR environment. Reports containing heat maps and trajectories describing the eye gaze together with times and results of the tasks are automatically generated after the test has been completed. This extended information which is automatically gathered is meant to further expand the toolbox that psychologists use when performing psychological testing and might aid them in improving the accuracy of the results obtained from these tests