Hybrid Commissioning - Speeding-up Commissioning of Field Bus Driven Production Plants

The commissioning of complex mechatronical industrial systems like production plants is still a critical phase and represents a high percentage of the overall engineering process. The Hybrid Commissioning method is a new approach to increase the efficiency of the commissioning, i.e. to reduce the costs and the danger of damages. Hybrid Commissioning starts with a simulation of the complete plant and the components of the simulated plant are substituted stepwise by their real counterparts. Especially for field bus driven production plants, this kind of parallel operation poses a challenge. Therefore, a supporting tool system with a specific architecture is necessary. In order to combine signal values of real and simulated components within this architecture in a useful way, a so called merge tool has been developed. In this paper, the Hybrid Commissioning method is introduced by means of an example of a PROFIBUS driven production plant.