Hardware-in-the-loop simulation for a production system

Abstract

This paper proposes a hardware-in-the-loop simulation (HILS) approach for the design and verification of a production system. The design of a production system involves two major activities: mechanical design (device specification and layouts) and electrical design (device behaviour and system control). Conventionally, the mechanical and electrical design activities have been performed sequentially, wasting time. We propose a concurrent procedure of mechanical and electrical design based on the HILS methodology to cope with this problem. The proposed HILS approach provides two major benefits: (1) the verified control program can be directly used for the real plant with minor adaptations; and (2) the verified 3D layout model can be used to generate the detailed drawings for the implementation of the plant. We can minimise the stabilisation time of a production system, since most mechanical and electrical errors can be found and fixed using HILS.

Keywords:

• HILS
• mechanical design
• electrical design
• physical model
• logical model

Acknowledgements

This work was partially supported by the Defense Acquisition Program Administration and the Agency for Defense Development under the contract no. UD080042AD. Also, the research was partially supported by the National Research Foundation grant (2010-0021040) funded by the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology, Korea.