Plug-and-Simulate within Modular Assembly Line enabled by Digital Twins and the use of AutomationML

The Digital Age is becoming the de-facto of future direction in manufacturing domain. Its main driver is the pressure of shorter product life cycles and leads companies to faster engineering time of their production lines. To cope with the need, recent literature has successfully shown modular production and assembly line concepts by using standardized interfaces on electromechanical and communication level. This change entails new challenges. Given the fact that production life cycle decreases, the usage of tools for digital manufacturing and simulation grow in importance to support and evaluate the impact of increasing engineering and decision-making processes. The concurrent combination of the physical world with its digital counterpart will be crucial. This paper proposes how engineers set up the digital environment automatically by using a common data model inspired by the Digital Twin concept. Its instantiation for several assembly modules based on AutomationML consists of a set of engineering data and relevant models to support a proof-of-concept of Plug-and-Simulate within a modular, multi-vendor assembly line.