Test methodology for virtual commissioning based on behaviour simulation of production systems

Today's highly increasing product diversity and decreasing product life cycles, also in the automotive industry lead to fast changing production systems with a high ratio of mechatronic components and (control) software. That again leads to ever increasing use of Virtual Commissioning during the development process of automated manufacturing plants. Paired with the still increasing request towards better control program quality, this leads to the need of improved and more efficient virtual plants with more effortless set ups. The common techniques of simulating the plant within the Virtual Commissioning do no longer fulfil these needs, new approaches have to be developed. At the same time, requests towards higher efficiency and higher test coverage during Virtual Commissioning are rising, which leads to the need of developments of easier testing processes. The presented work is concerned with this further developments, especially the test methodology for virtual commissioning based on appropriate behaviour simulation of automated production systems within the automotive industry. Therefore the state of the art is analysed and existing spheres of activity are identified. Afterwards, new approach and solutions for this fields, namely the appropriate behaviour simulation as well as the automatization of testing, are elaborated. An extensive example implementation evaluates the presented results regarding feasibility and eligible performance. Thus, the elaborated outstanding improvements of Virtual Commissioning are not only presented but the corresponding proof of concept is also adduced.