Industrial design based on computer aided simulation

Jianxun Wang, Qingyun Zhou

Zhengzhou Technical College, Zhengzhou, 450121, China

Recently, new technologies have emerged in industrial automation platforms. A rapid modelling and simulation environment is required to integrate these new technologies with existing devices and platforms to reduce the design effort and time to market. System-level modelling is a popular design technique that provides early simulation, verification, and architectural exploration. However, integration of real devices with system models is quite challenging due to synchronization and hard real-time constraints in industrial automation. Simulations are software tools approximating and predicting the behaviour of real industrial plants. Unlike real plants, the utilization of simulations cannot cause dam-ages and it saves time and costs during series of experiments. A shortcoming of current simulation models is the complicated runtime integration into legacy industrial systems and platforms, as well as ad-hoc design phase, introducing manual and error-prone work. This paper contributes to improve the efficiency of simulation model design and integration. It utilizes a semantic knowledge base, implemented by ontologies and their mappings. The integration uses the Automation Service Bus and the paper explains how to configure the runtime integration level semantically.