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Product lifecycles are getting increasingly shorter, but the lifecycles of industrial automation systems remain stable. Since future requirements for the industrial automation systems made by the market are often unknown at the beginning of the planning process, industrial automation systems have to be adaptable at later times. In addition, the efforts of planning should be reduced continuously without...
The Virtual eXperiences Lab at RMIT is a “21st century lab scope,” an enabling platform for research and prototyping in industrial automation, focusing on software engineering, next generation human-machine interaction experiences, user interfaces, and training. VxLab combines high resolution visualization, industrial automation facilities and cloud-based simulation servers in a dedicated private...
The current economical situation has forced European industries to increase their competitiveness regarding production system flexibility. One of the key initiatives within this research and development process is the german “Industrie 4.0” initiative aiming on increasing flexibility and improving vertical and horizontal integration. One key element of this initiative is the “Industrie 4.0 component”,...
Nowadays, it is well recognized that flexibility, modularity and reconfigurability are the main challenges in the design of manufacturing systems. Automated warehouse systems play a key role in such systems and are currently controlled using hierarchical and centralized control architectures and conventional automation programming techniques. In this paper, we present preliminary results in developing...
Many Factory Automation Systems (FASs) are been increasingly required to provide 24/7 in-service operation. This demands increasingly-higher levels of autonomy, and makes FAS control architectures include extra regulating capabilities in order to deal with long-term but also non-stop operations. Continuous assurance of effectively-coordinated adaptation to unpredictable internal and external changes...
This paper provides a discussion on the coming technological changes in process automation of networked production systems, which will change the testing procedure. In the smart factory of the future there will be no possibility to reach a test coverage of 100%, assuming a flexible automation with continuous reconfiguration and dynamic changes during runtime. Consequently, large amounts of test cases...
In the industrial automation a paradigm shift from centralized, static automation structures to reconfigurable manufacturing systems (RMS) might be lie ahead. RMS are seen as a key enabler for the required changeability of future production companies since they can reduce the engineering effort needed for the reconfiguration of existing or the construction of new production systems. However, it is...
This paper addresses the efficient generation of models for cyber-physical systems from large historical data sets. A cyber-physical system (CPS) is a system composed of physical subsystems together with computing and networking. CPS models are required for monitoring and control of the physical processes. Such models are in general hybrid models that take into account both discrete control signals...
In order to achieve rapid development process and reduce the time to market, new approaches have been investigated for automotive body assembly design. This research presents a prospective study about using plant digital mock up to support industrialization process and design reviews. The concept of Digital Lot (DLot) is introduced as a design object to validate a layout and assembly processes alternative...
Automated production systems are usually driven by Programmable Logic Controllers (PLCs). These systems are long-living and have high requirements for software quality to avoid downtimes, damaged product and harm to personnel. While commissioning multiple systems of similar type, pragmatic adjustments of the software are often necessary, which results in two or more similar variants of initially identical...
Interoperability is a key feature in today's IT-Environments. To achieve interoperability, the user's actions when connecting two different systems have to be minimized. For this reason, several service based systems have been developed. However, as far as the current implementations in the field are concerned, all of them need connectors and gateways that are individually developed to connect heterogeneous...
The fact that normal tasks of control blocks are highly complex and unnecessarily overfitted has led to superfluously high workloads with regard to engineering and development. Existing concepts of variability handling are not designed for this use case. Therefore we present a new variant description model and concept for a control block variant management technique. This concept ensures that the...
As a standardized communication protocol, OPC UA is the main focal point with regard to information exchange in the ongoing initiative Industrie 4.0. But there are also considerations to use it within the Internet of Things. The fact that currently no open reference implementation can be used in research for free represents a major problem in this context. The authors have the opinion that open source...
In the development of PLC software for automated Production Systems the method copy & paste is commonly used. However, this method leads to various disadvantages. To avoid these disadvantages, a parameter-based concept for planed reuse is presented in this paper. By means of the Siemens PLC software of an automated warehouse, the concept is defined and evaluated. In a first step, the PLC software...
OPC UA (IEC 62541) has proven to be a very rich and versatile technology, not least of which we find with the release of the Field Device Integration standard, FDI, in 2014 [16]. However, when introducing such a standard within products or systems on a broad scale, also economic questions on development effort and footprint must be answered. Ideally, we wish technology to be versatile, time-efficient...
This contribution presents a novel approach for the automatic generation of simulation models for existing plants. The aim is to focus on brown-field projects for which the automation system has to be renewed. Whereas most research approaches for simulation based control code testing focus on green-field projects, the authors developed a method that considers the type of planning, as well as engineering...
In this paper an innovative concept for a fault prevention in industrial automation systems is presented. The goal of this concept is the avoidance of downtimes, by means of the early identification of fault developments during runtime. Additionally, in comparison to common fault prevention solutions, today's complexity of prevention processes and the increasing amount of data is aimed to be reduced...
The reduction of the effort required for integration of a module into a production plant is the fundamental aim of modular plant architectures. Effective module integration can be achieved, for instance, by shifting engineering efforts from the classical site-engineering to the engineering of plant modules. The basis of this approach is the formal description of various aspects of a module in a module...
In recent years automation systems have been required to provide characteristics of flexibility and efficiency in order to cope with the fast changes of the market and consumer demands. To deal with these requirements, the industry has started to implement reconfiguration techniques in order to allow the automation system to reschedule the production, recover from faulty situations and to update the...
The quality of the software has an increasing impact on the performance, operation and ultimately the cost of industrial automation systems. Software metrics are necessary to assess the quality and to identify modules that impact cost of testing and maintenance. There is a number of software metrics available within a software engineering domain. However, there is a gap when it comes to evaluating...
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