Virtual Commissioning of a sorting system of an automatic machine for paper roll packaging

What is happening nowadays is, in all respects, a great industrial revolution, which has radically changed the manufacturing industry sector. The complexity of modern production plants is constantly growing, and the continuous technological progress places an enormous effort on the shoulders of manufacturers to satisfy the requirements set by an increasingly competitive market. Today the validation and testing of an automation system is a demanding task, usually performed in very tight deadlines. Therefore, the use of simulations to verify the automation system early in the design phase can be very beneficial. In this context, technologies such as Digital Twin or Virtual Commissioning come into play, both of which have, at the base, the idea of building and exploiting a completely digital replica of a real system. Virtual Commissioning allows to test the control software of a real machine on a virtual model, or a Digital Twin, in a risk-free environment. This allows to have an early software debug and to reduce possible errors as well as reduce the commissioning time of a machine. The thesis work deals with the Virtual Commissioning of a sorter system at the entrance to an automatic machine for packaging paper rolls, in order to test the control software and evaluate its performance. From this work it is possible to understand which are the steps and the necessary tools for the realization of the virtual commissioning of an automatic machine. It immediately emerges how effective it is to work through simulations on a virtual model of the machine rather than on the real machine. Finally, the future possibilities of virtual commissioning of the entire automatic machine are discussed.