Benefit from simulating early in MDE of industrial control

This article focuses on integration of simulations to model-driven engineering (MDE) of automation and control systems and applications. MDE offers means to automate repetitive design tasks and thus improves the efficiency of development work. However, it does not reduce the need for genuine decisions of professional developers to challenging design tasks. Formerly, the decision making has been facilitated with separate process simulations to predict the characteristics of controlled processes. This paper presents and evaluates a new way to seamlessly integrate simulations to early phases in MDE of control applications. On one hand, we argue why and how simulations should be organized in MDE in the domain. On the other hand, we present and summarize observations from the experiments in which our simulation approach has been used.