Virtual Commissioning for a Linear 12-Axis Machine

Sammanfattning: In practice, Virtual Commissioning is a technical method within the au- tomation field where you can create a simulated twin factory to a real physical factory containing functional machines. The purpose of Virtual Commissioning is to move a great portion of the commissioning tasks to an earlier state in the project. To make this possible a simulation model of a system is created within a simulation program. The behavior of the system is then programmed through an external PLC program. This allows for software testing simultaneously with the software development environment to verify the functions of the PLC program. This thesis investigated the possibility of using a simulation program, Visual Components, on four transportation robots with three linear axes each. These transportation robots would then together represent the entire linear 12-axis machine. The four robots could then be moved separately or all together by changing their 3D-positions through PLC code sent into Visual Components. Furthermore the programming environment of TwinCAT was used. The vision was to connect Visual Components and TwinCAT through a communication protocol - Beckhoff ADS. Through ADS communication, data could be sent back and forth between the two programs. To structure the code, the OMAC PackML construction was decided to be implemented. In addition, a HMI (a display with buttons to be pressed by a machine operator) was constructed. By the HMI, all necessary functions such as point-to-point movement, jogging and stopping were implemented. The final result was a software program based upon PackML in TwinCAT, a HMI and a Visualized model in Visual Components.