The Simulation of Conveyor Control System Using the Virtual Commissioning and Virtual Reality

Designing of the conveyors and its control system with control program through the design tool "Virtual Commissioning" is very important in the digital era Industry 4.0. Virtual Commissioning was recently used to perform realistic virtual simulations in the early stages of development processes in automation of the conveyors too. The main benefit is the possibility of integrating and testing the control system through the simulation on the virtual model even before physically constructing the conveyor. The contribution focuses on the possibilities of transforming a real conveyor into a virtual model in the Siemens Tecnomatix Process Simulate program and integrating the Siemens S7-300 real control system to control the conveyor itself. In the model it was allowed to test and perform numerous variations and situations without physical intervention into the real conveyor and possible damage functional parts including through virtual reality. These experiments were subsequently evaluated and the control system optimized with respect to material flow and the developed PLC code on virtual model was verified on real conveyor control system.