Virtual commissioning for an enameling machine line

Nowdays, simulation is a key instrument in the automation world. You can simulate to create a prototype of an industrial robot, to check a machine line production flow, o for commercial purposes, to show your customers a virtual working reproduction of the machine you are selling. Most of the simulation software also offer the possibility to emulate a machine line, recieving PLC signals and reproducing the machine behavior accordingly. The main purpose of this project is to develop an application for simulation and emulation of an enameling machine line programmed by Iprel Progetti, a company of Sacmi Group situated in Imola. Most of the project is about the software selection between two simulation environment called Visual Components and Emulate3D. Two projects were developed for the two software, reproducing only the first part of the machine line to understand which one fit the best the requirements. Visual components showed better options in components parametrization and CAD functionalities, but Emulate3D had way better graphic options that led to better performances. Phyisics functionalities were excluded on Visual Components to reduce the software computational weight, but Emulate3D managed to keep higher performance while reproducing a decent physics application. Lastly, the project was expanded to the whole machine only on Emulate3D with a set of additional features that were used to emulate the PLC code, allowing to easily reproduce niche situations and find the trickiest points to fix the potential software bugs.