Manufacturing machine virtual commissioning: Automated validation of the control software

This paper presents a method to automate the validation tests of a manufacturing machine software with virtual commissioning elements. The work is applied to a welding tool that serves as a brace to keep a mechanical part immobilized during the welding operations. The proposed method consists in three parts: a simulation model of the mechanical components behavior, an environment to run the controlling system and a supervisor software that runs automatically the test scenarios and records the behavior of the controlling system. The analysis of the results will demonstrate that the controlling system is able to perform the right reaction in either nominal or defective scenarios.