Validation of dynamic interoperability and virtual commissioning of production equipment in early development stages

Virtual Commissioning is an important part of modern design engineering approaches. Early simulation models of newly developed production structures can help to elaborate and evaluate different ideas concerning new processes. The machine communication is an important part of this evaluation. Currently the focus is on different approaches like CPS, IIoT and the overall crosslinking in Industry 4.0 implementations. In many of these cases the functional static behaviour of the communication interface is checked in later phases of the development process and not in a dynamical aspect, although it is useful to understand it early to draw conclusions for the proceeding project. This paper shows an early simple approach for checking the dynamical interoperability between the different automation levels in a production environment by adapting known Virtual Commissioning methods to a broader view.