Automated partitioning of real-time co-simulations for the virtual commissioning of production systems (aCoSi)

• Applicant: Professor Dr.-Ing. Alexander Verl
• Subject Area: Production Automation and Assembly Technology
• Term: since 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 497674736

In this project, partitioning mechanisms to parallelize the calculations of the model of virtual production systems in real-time co-simulations for virtual commissioning will be examined. In the spotlight of the research is a completely automated partitioning based on numerical and information technology approaches in consideration of numerical effects and occurring simulation errors.In virtual planning, dimensioning and commissioning, the requirements on the informative value of virtual production systems for the comprehensive mapping of interactions between production process, machine, control system and operator are increasing. However, the increasing model complexity poses new challenges for the real-time simulation within a hardware-in-the-loop simulation with industrial control systems. A possibility to improve the performance of the simulator used is the parallelization of the model calculations in so-called co-simulation architectures. In preliminary works, a framework for the real-time co-simulation with appropriate co-simulation mechanisms was developed. The project envisaged is based on these works. In the beginning, new partitioning mechanisms shall be researched and an automated partitioning shall be conceived. For this purpose, numerical as well as information technology approaches will be analyzed and combined where applicable (hybrid approaches). Afterwards, the integration of the developed partitioning mechanisms in the real-time co-simulation framework will be examined. To do so, the mechanisms conceived will be implemented and the processes integrated in the framework. Finally, a runtime analysis and a numerical evaluation of the developed mechanisms will be conducted, the potential of the researched solutions will be presented and subsequent works will be defined.Within this project, an automated partitioning in consideration of numerical effects in a real-time co-simulation architecture will take place for the first time. The success of the project will be measurable in a relevant shortening of the necessary computation time and thus in the first calculation of comprehensive high-resolution virtual production systems under the real-time conditions which arise through the integration of industrial control systems.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants