Reliable Virtual Commissioning

Licentiate thesis, 2012

Virtual commissioning is a technique for programming, optimising and verifying industrial automated production, such as robot controllers and programmable logic controllers (PLC), off-line in a simulated environment. Compared with traditional robot off-line programming and simulation, the scope is wider and can include an entire production cell. Robot simulation is a well-established technique and widely used in industry today, much thanks to the RRS interface that enables simulated robot control systems to be integrated in the simulation software. A more general interface for industrial control system integration is OPC that has been an industrial de facto standard for connection between industrial control systems and regular PCs. State-of-the-art production simulation tools often include the possibility to connect an industrial control system via OPC. However, OPC suffers a major drawback when it comes to production simulation, there is no mechanism that synchronises the industrial control system with the simulation and this could lead to unreliable results from the simulation. Another obstacle for virtual commissioning is the amount of time that needs to be spent during the simulation model building phase, since virtual commissioning includes more signals. This does not only take more time, but it is also an error prone process that might lead to unreliable results. In this thesis problems related to the OPC interface and the modelling process are discussed, and suggestions how these issues can be solved are presented so reliable virtual commissioning can be achieved.