Towards Service-Based Flexible Production Control Systems and their Modular Modeling and Simulation

Modeling of modern production plants often requires that the system provides means to cope with frequent changes in topology and equipment and can easily be adapted to new or changing requirements. For validation in form of simulation, however, usually a complete specification of both, the production control software and the physical elements of the manufacturing plant is required. We therefore proposed to use a service-based architectural approach to build the control software using more rigorous separation by means of well-defined interfaces following the software component paradigm. We present an extension of ROOM that further facilitates service-based design and permits the independent validation of components for such a design style. We show how the combination of both concepts permits the compositional validation of the system and thus enables early design validation even for flexible systems. The presented approach further reduces the validation overhead imposed by design evolution as long as local component properties are considered and component interfaces are stable.