Project - EfA

Project Description "EfA"

Design methods for automation systems with model integration and evaluation of variants

in German: EfA - Entwurfsmethoden für Automatisierungssysteme mit Modellintegration und automatischer Variantenbewertung

Duration: Sep 2012 – Aug 2015

With the steady growth of complexities of manufacturing plants and production lines for automation systems, the engineering phase of planning and operation of those production systems are facing more challenges. To enable the automation engineers to make an optimized production plan in an efficient way, a model-based approach will be realized in EfA project in combination with automated planning and programming.

The main aim of this project is to develop methods, tools and solutions, which firstly save costs for designing and modification of complex and heterogeneous automation systems at the field level, the control level and the supervision level.

The major effort of SWK in this project is to adopt the methods of Software Production Line (SPL) in the domain of automation systems. With the usage of SPL, the commonalities of all variants will be developed in an effective and managed way. The derived variants can be then evaluated and validated on the basis of formally-defined product requirements.

Below some approaches to support a partial automation design process are listed:

- Formalization of models for heterogeneous systems
- Mappings between different models baded on a meta-model
- Integration of engineering models and tools
- Validation of consistency for sulutions
- Extension of models with explicit variant modelling
- Deriving variants from a common set of core assets with a tool configurator
- Evaluation of variants with model verification and virtual system integration

Contact: Prof. M. Riebisch, Y. Wang

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Keywords used in this project: Automation system, meta-model, variant model, consistency check, Automation-ML, CAEX, OPC-UA, IEC 61131, IEC 61499, IEC 62424

Collaborative research partners: Fraunhofer IOSB-INA and HS-OWL Lemgo, LeiKon GmbH Herzogenrath, inpro Berlin, Lenze Automation GmbH Aerze

Sponsor: Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) under grant no. 01M3204C