Petri net controlled virtual commissioning – A virtual design-loop approach

Abstract

Abstract With the increasing system complexity, in the course of the introduction of modern technologies in today’s production systems, the system-related modeling effort in the virtual production planning phase also increases not only in terms of time but also extensively and leads to extended design requirements. Virtual Commissioning (VC) as a digital planning tool for validating highly automated systems in industry or cyber-physical systems (CPS) in research, is an already established method and has to be continually developed to meet these increasing design requirements. In addition, the modelling scope of the control-related behavior models is increasing and inevitably becomes confusing, especially beyond the process designer area, which makes it difficult for process owners to understand the control-specific behavior of the systems. Therefore, this paper deals with methods for the virtual development and validation of control structures of complex system relationships, evaluates them according to the respective area of application and puts them into the context of this work in order to demonstrate the need for a method to be able to provide a clear and interpretable representation of control-related behavior models. Subsequently, a graphically based modeling approach based on a petri-network for the control of virtual production models is presented, applied to an industry-related virtual demonstrator and evaluated for process-related robustness.