Rapid prototyping of automated manufacturing systems by software-in-the-loop simulation

Nowadays automated manufacturing systems are designed as the complex interconnection of components belonging to different engineering domains. Actually high performances are required in order to satisfy market needs and standards. In this framework the validation via simulation plays a crucial role as it allows to verify the system during the design phase. Software-in-the-loop architectures represent a good practice to take into account also technological side-effects that represent a classical cause of long time-to-market or, in the worst case, to project failure. In this paper we present a mathematical simulator to be used within a software-in-the-loop prototyping system.