Concept for modelling and testing of individual mechatronic components for manufacturing plant simulation

Simulation technology is widely used in the engineering process of manufacturing plants, which promises the benefits such as debugging the programs of Programmable Logic Controller (PLC) in the early design phase, validating the co-working of the associated machines and accelerating the commissioning time. Although many researches have been made on this topic in recent years, the high cost of simulation model development compensates most benefits mentioned above which could be gained Furthermore, the validation of the simulation model is mostly done manually because of the lack of a systematical testing method This paper proposes a concept to extend the IEC 61131-3 standard library for simulation modeling and testing of behavior of mechatronic components. Furthermore, this approach will be prototypical implemented and illustrated.