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2012
Conference Paper
Titel
Concept for seamless engineering tool chain for PLC-controlled specialized production machines
Abstract
Special purpose machines are engineered and built for specific tasks within a plant. Therefore they have no significant lot size. Based on this situation, the engineering process for special machines is done within a sequential process starting with mechanics, continued by electrics and closed by automation discipline. Usually the disciplines use specific software tools to support their work. After finishing the engineering, the assembly and commissioning is done. Thereby problems may be recognized, which can lead to high non-conformance costs. At some companies this sequential process was accelerated through sharing documents between the different disciplines. The separate phases are supported by tools very well and can't be shortened anymore. To reduce further time within the engineering process the disciplines must be parallelized. Therefore the Directive VDI 2206 was developed, to provide a method for parallel engineering of mechatronics systems. Thereby the engineering process is divided into three main phases: the concept phase, discipline specific detailing and system integration. Machine-builders should define the concept for all related disciplines holistically before each discipline starts detailing. The system integration can be done by the method of virtual commissioning. Based on this, the paper describes different tools for supporting these phases. To enable reuse of data along the whole engineering process, the paper shows how these tools could be connected, to achieve a continuous software-based engineering workflow starting with requirements and ending with commissioning of special machines. Therefor a concept is defined to transfer data from concept phase to discipline specific tools for detailing. Also a generator is introduced that reuses results of the detailing phase to build up a model for virtual commissioning automatically.
Author(s)