Incremental Development of Production Units Using HW/SW-Encapsulation and Simulation Supported By a Complete Toolset

Abstract

Manufacturing systems are developed and configured using different design tools, e.g. CAD for mechanical construction, CAEfor electronic engineering and IDEfor software development. These tools work on different views of automation units, which are the basic blocks of manufacturing systems. With this, tool dependent data is generated that relates to automation units involved in the manufacturing process. These tool dependent data sets can be seen as data objects, which are disjunctive in terms of information content.This paper presents a framework, which allows the integration ofdifferent design tools. Theframework is based on concept of holistic mechatronic objects (HMO), where automation units and related tool dependent data sets are seen as mechatronic objects and related data objects. The framework allows 3D simulation of manufacturing systems on high performance PC clusters using the VRML export of CAD tools. The virtual reality modelling environment interacts with a simulation of the control environment. Since 3D-information is provided and available via the framework, software for automation units can be implemented and tested in parallel to the hardware development, reducing development time.

Specification of Holistic Mechatronic Objects Based on Semantic Web Technology

“…Schmidtmann et al [12]) goes back to the observation that if the underlying real-time driver of the fieldbus device is replaced by an virtual driver which sends the messages via a specific 4TM EPLAN, http://www.eplan.org 5TM SENGATEC http://www.sengatec.de task to a simulation evaluating the messages and generating itself messages back to the application the simulation of the conveyor can be implemented as soon as possible. Furthermore, the simulation task related to the frequency converter U1 sends messages to the transform node of the driving axis axis1 in the VRML visualization.…”

“…The concept of holistic mechatronic object has been motivated by the recent research on an automated process for simulation of product lines [12], which is related to the term "digital fabrication" also. E.g.…”

“…[12]) is concerned with linking together the tools from different design domains CAD 1 , CAE 2 and IDE 3 . For this, the concept of holonic mechatronic objects is used, such that interrelated information from different tools can be treated as a unit, e.g.…”