Comparison of material flow models and acceleration of the macroscopic flow model for virtual commissioning

Material flow simulations are of increasing importance for the virtual commissioning of control systems especially regarding plants in production. Material flow models for piece goods in literature can be mostly divided into four categories which differ in their suitability to the requirements of simulations for virtual commissioning. This paper presents an overview of the material flow models regarding model description and usage. It will be shown that the macroscopic flow model has potential for virtual commissioning. Improvements to achieve real-time capability through parallelization of the macroscopic flow model are introduced.