Economic application of virtual commissioning to mechatronic production systems

The interaction of heterogenous control hard and software plays a key role in enabling mechatronic production systems to become flexible and agile systems. Nevertheless, control software engineering still tends to be the last step within the development process. To a large extent it is carried out during the commissioning phase of the production ramp-up. On the first hand this leads to a loss of time and quality as well as to a loss of reputation and future orders on the second hand. A method that is referred to as Virtual Commissioning tries to overcome this situation. The aim is to enable control software engineering to, both take over the initiative in system design and to perform important activities earlier in the design process of production equipment. In this paper, the technological and economical scalability of Virtual Commissioning is analyzed. Based on the analysis, a technical concept for a scalable simulation environment is presented. The paper concludes with a new method for the economic application of Virtual Commissioning.