No abstract

Abstract. In automation plants, technical processes must be conducted in a way that products, substances, or services are produced reliably, with sufficient quality and with minimal strain on resources. A key driver in conducting these processes is the automation plant's control software, which controls the technical plant components and thereby affects the physical, chemical, and mechanical processes that take place in automation plants. To this end, the control software of an automation plant must adhere to strict process requirements arising from the technical processes, and from the physical plant design. Currently, the validation of the control software often starts late in the engineering process in many cases -once the automation plant is almost completely constructed. However, as widely acknowledged, the later the control software of the automation plant is validated, the higher the effort for correcting revealed defects is, which can lead to serious budget overruns and project delays. In this article we propose an approach that allows the early validation of automation control software against the technical plant processes and assumptions about the physical plant design by means of simulation. We demonstrate the application of our approach on the example of an actual plant project from the automation industry and present it's technical implementation.

This paper proposes to combine the concept of digital twins with the concept of dataspaces to fulfill the original expectation that a digital twin is a comprehensive virtual representation of physical assets. Based upon a terminological and conceptual discussion of digital twins and dataspaces, this paper claims that a systemic approach towards digital twin Systems is required. The key conceptual approach consists of a Reference Model for Digital Twin Systems (DTS-RM) and a hypothesis regarding a symbiotic evolution. The DTS-RM distinguishes between a digital twin back-end platform comprising the access and management of comprehensive digital twin instances and digital twin-related services, and digital twin front-end services that are tailored to the demands of applications and users. The main purpose of the back-end platform is to decouple the digital twin’s generation and management from the usage of the digital twin for applications.

No abstract

Modeling and simulation is an established scientific and industrial method to support engineers in their work in all lifecycle phases-from first concepts or tender to operation and service-of a technical system. Due to the fact of increasing complexity of such systems, e.g. plants, cyber-physical systems and infrastructures, system simulation is rapidly gaining impact. In this paper, a simulation architecture is presented and discussed on three different industrial applications, which offers a client-server concept to master the challenges of a lifecycle spanning simulation framework. Looking ahead, open software concepts for modeling, simulation and optimization will be required to cover new co-simulation techniques and to realize distributed, for example web-based simulation environments and tools.