Proceedings of the 2007 Winter Simulation Conference S. G. Henderson, B. Biller, M.-H. Hsieh, J. Shortle, J. D. Tew, and R. R. Barton, eds. ENABLING INDUSTRIAL SCALE SIMULATION / EMULATION MODELS Michael Johnstone Doug Creighton Saeid Nahavandi Intelligent Systems Research Lab Deakin University Pigdons Rd, Waurn Ponds Victoria Australia ABSTRACT OLE Process Control (OPC) is an industry standard that facilitates the communication between PCs and Program- mable Logic Controllers (PLC). This communication al- lows for the testing of control systems with an emulation model. When models require faster and higher volume communications, limitations within OPC prevent this. In this paper an interface is developed to allow high speed and high volume communications between a PC and PLC enabling the emulation of larger and more complex control systems and their models. By switching control of ele- ments within the model between the model engine and the control system it is possible to use the model to validate the system design, test the real world control systems and visualise real world operation. 1 INTRODUCTION A 3D model coupled with Discrete Event Simulation (DES) enables the creation of real world systems for visu- alisation and analysis. With such powerful tools complex systems can be modelled and a multitude of questions asked about the system, questions ranging from analysis of the system performance to “what if” scenarios. These models can be made more valuable with the realisation that they can be used to also test real world control systems. Emulation, testing a control system via a computer model, allows for the off line development of control programs and testing of changes and numerous benefits detailed in literature. In a complex system it may be desirable to test only parts of the control system. Glinsky et al. (2004) in their modelling of a hardware-in-the-loop system incrementally moved elements from the model into the real world as they become available. This same concept can be applied to emulation models. Control of elements within the model can be passed back and forth between the external control system and the simulation engine, allowing testing of indi- vidual parts of a control system or the entire control sys- tem. Now with a 3D model of the system being controlled by the real world control system a powerful visualisation tool is available that can be used once the system is live. Data from the control system can be used to drive the model to represent what is occurring in the real world to allow for monitoring of the system. The original model created for validation of design or analysis can be used for much more than just the original purpose. The paper is laid out as follows. Section 2 gives a re- view of the previous work in emulation while section 3 de- fines hybrid environment and how this was achieved. Sec- tion 4 gives the results for testing carried out with the interface defined in section 3, while section 5 gives a summary of the work and suggests areas where this new environment is suitable. 2 REVIEW OF PREVIOUS WORK IN EMULATION The objective of emulation, or soft-commissioning as it has also been referred to as (Schludermann et al. 2000;Versteegt et al. 2002), is to connect actual real world control systems to simulation models to test the operation of those control systems (Schludermann et al. 2000;Schiess 2001;McGregor 2002). Successful emulation implementa- tions have been achieved in varying fields, for example, baggage handling systems (Rengelink et al. 2002) and ma- terial delivery systems (Lebaron et al. 1998). Historically the testing of control systems was achieved by connecting individual test or mock-up devices to elements of the control system. This method of testing required considerable time and resources and failed to test the system as a whole (Whorter et al. 1997;Schludermann et al. 2000). Due to this lack of adequate testing options 1028 1-4244-1306-0/07/$25.00 ©2007 IEEE