A general take on a Tecnomatix Process Simulate´s Digital Twin creation and its exchange of information with the TIA Portal and PLC SIM Advanced

Abstract

Digital twins are rapidly establishing themselves as a necessary step in digital change also in the design of automated and robotic manufacturing systems. The digital twin serves as an interface between physical industrial products and digital worlds. This allows you to map the continuous availability of data throughout the lifecycle from product planning and development, production and commissioning to use and recycling. An important step towards this goal is to create digital twins of the components in order to create a database usable for the design of new production systems in a virtual environment. One of the possibilities of using the digital twins is testing and virtual commissioning of production systems. Instead of the classic CAD model, the digital twin replaces a detailed digital image of individual components, including their full functionality. The Digital Twin comprises the CAD model, kinematic behavior model a most important is the logical behavior model. Our goal is to create a digital twin component of the production system, integrate a CAD model, create a kinematic model and a logical behavior model. This digital twin will have signals assigned to it for logical behavior. The result is the verification and testing of the information exchange between the virtual control system and the virtual model, using the Software-in-the-Loop method and the Tecnomatix Process Simulate software environment on the digital twin side and the Siemens TIA Portal with PLC SIM Advanced on the controller side. The result of the knowledge is that the exchange of information is functional and usable for virtual commissioning.