Component-Based Simulation Tool For Virtual Commissioning Of Control Systems For Heat Exchange And Distribution Processes

This paper deals with the validation of the concept of the component-based simulation tool and its application for virtual commissioning of the industrial control systems. It is shown how to decompose the heat exchange and distribution system into the general-purpose components and then how to use these components for designing the component-based simulator of the process, which is suitable to use in virtual commissioning environment. Simulator is based on SIMULINK and WinMOD. General hardware configuration and logical layers of the experimental setup, which was used during the experiments, are shown and described in details. Then, this simulator is tested for its simulation accuracy and the hardware experimental setup is tested for its applicability for virtual commissioning of the control systems for continuous dynamical processes of medium and high complexity. Communications lags between examined control system and simulator are analyzed due to checking whether the experiment results obtained depend of simulator's time scaling factor.