Advancing virtual commissioning with variant handling

Nowadays the software development plays an important role in the entire value chain in production machine and plant engineering. An important component for rapid development of high quality software is the virtual commissioning. The real machine is described on the basis of simulation models. Therefore, the control software can be verified at an early stage using the simulation models. Since production machines are produced highly individual or in very small series, the challenge of virtual commissioning is to reduce the effort to the development of simulation models. Therefore, a systematic reuse of the simulation models and the control software for different variants of a machine is essential for an economic use. This necessarily requires a consideration of the variability which may occur between the production machines. This paper analyzes the question of how to systematically deal with the software-related variability in the context of virtual commissioning. For this purpose, first the characteristics of the virtual commissioning and variability handling are considered. Subsequently, the requirements to a so-called variant infrastructure for virtual commissioning are analyzed and possible solutions are discussed