A Framework for Multidisciplinary Simulation of Cyber-Physical Production Systems

Abstract New simulation architectures are needed to provide simulation of cyber-physical production systems. This paper presents a flexible co-simulation framework to couple simulation models of different engineering domains and simulation tools to save modeling effort as well as to analyze the system’s behaviour and the interaction of system components within the cyber-physical production system virtually. Three main components shape the presented MAYA co-simulation framework: on the one hand, a central simulation coordinator serves as a middleware coordinating the entire simulation process and on the other hand, different simulation tools cover the simulation of different engineering aspects. As a third component a connector between the simulation coordinator and single simulation tools is needed as an adapter. Its interface to the simulation coordinator is fixed, whereas different implementations of the adapter’s interface to the simulation tools are shown depending on the tool provided interfaces. In addition to the overall description, the co-simulation framework is as well illustrated by an example.