Virtual Commissioning : Virtual Commissioning of ABB Production cell
Abstract: The background of the concept, ABB Production Cell, meets the increasing demands from manufacturing industries throughout the world to simplify through standardization and by that reduce investment cost and operating cost throughout the entire lifecycle of the production cell. ABB is delivering the production cell as one easy to order, use, and maintain. The production cell is developed for virtual versions and full scale production cells. The different modules shall be utilized and presented in RobotStudio and configured in Automation Builder. With generic templates and hardware it provides e.g. early visualization, standardized systems, shortened design/development phase, and enable virtual FAT(Factory Acceptance Test). There is multiple ways of doing a virtual commissioning and it’s a known approach for testing software and hardware together. The method used in this project is known as SIL (Software-In-The-Loop). This means that the hardware runs as software- e.g. PLC, Drives and HMI- with same properties and behavior as the real hardware. This thesis focus on describing phases of an automation system and see how different phases are affected by a virtual commissioning. Benefits will be described and the existing software will be evaluated. Furthermore, an attempt of virtual commissioning has been done with focus on connecting the software for stable communication with the virtual PLC and make a PLC-task with a handshake to the robot controller and the virtual environment. The system is tested in a virtual environment with vFAT and then on the workshop (FAT). This was done to see if the softwares replicated the same behavior as the hardwares. The result for the virtual commissioning is that it is possible to run the virtual PLC (VAC500) with the same time interface, behavior, and signals as the real PLC (AC500).
AT THIS PAGE YOU CAN DOWNLOAD THE WHOLE ESSAY. (follow the link to the next page)