Model-based cyber-physical system integration in the process industry

Process industry's modern process control valves are complex Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS). A valve positioner may be connected to thousands of different types of process valves, and operate under a large variety of environmental conditions; therefore it is unfeasible to conduct exhaustive physical tests. The end user expects the system to work under any conditions and configurations and deliver high performance whenever required. This paper presents a Virtual Testing Environment (VTE) for process industry CPS performance assessment based on Amesim simulation software. A set of innovative techniques are used to effectively search for the best and worst system performances within the unlimited solution space. In order to speed up the simulation, we combine model order reduction techniques with an extensible optimizer using with different solvers as Amesim plug-ins. A Scheduler was designed to execute simulation tasks on multiple servers in parallel. This paper presents the preliminary results based on Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) and over 5 billion configurations.