Survey on the virtual commissioning of manufacturing systems

Abstract This paper reviews and identifies issues in the application of virtual commissioning technology for automated manufacturing systems. While the real commissioning of a manufacturing system involves a real plant system and a real controller, the virtual commissioning deals with a virtual plant model and a real controller. The expected benefits of virtual commissioning are the reduction of debugging and correction efforts during the subsequent real commissioning stage. However, it requires a virtual plant model and hence still requires significant amount time and efforts. Two main issues are identified, the physical model construction of a virtual device, and the logical model construction of a virtual device. This paper reviews the current literature related to the two issues and proposes future research directions to achieve the full utilization of virtual commissioning technology.