Template-based modeling methodology of a virtual plant for virtual commissioning

This article presents a template-based modeling methodology for the effective construction of a virtual plant that can be used for the virtual commissioning of a programmable logic controller. For virtual commissioning, the corresponding virtual plant, consisting of virtual devices, is required to interact with the input and output symbols of a programmable logic controller. In other words, the behavior of a virtual device should be the same as that of the real device. Conventionally, discrete event systems specifications formalism has been used to represent the behavior of a virtual device. However, modeling using discrete event systems specifications formalism requires in-depth knowledge of simulation as well as significant amounts of time and effort. One of the key ideas of the proposed methodology is to provide a device template model representing the relations between the tasks of a device. The proposed template is very intuitive and can be used to generate a comprehensive behavior model of a virtual device. The proposed approach has been implemented and demonstrated for a robotic cell.