Design Automation for Smart Factories

The paper titled Enabling Component Reuse in Model-based System Engineering of Cyber-Physical Production Systems, authored by Stefano Spellini, Sebastiano Gaiardelli, Michele Lora and Franco Fummi, has been accepted at the 26th IEEE International Conference on Emerging Technologies and Factory Automation (ETFA 2021).

In this work, we outline a design flow contemplating the reuse of already existing manufacturing lines’ models, while designing novel advanced production systems. To enable such a flow, we propose a methodology extracting System Modeling Language (SysML) structural diagrams from AutomationML descriptions. Then, we propose to design the system functionalities on top of the produced diagrams.

The paper shows the application of the methodology to a concrete manufacturing line, the structure of which was originally modeled using AutomationML. To exemplify the advantages of the methodology, we exploit the models being generated to automatically extract a digital twin for the production system transportation line. The resulting digital twin is compliant with a well-known plant simulation tool.