Smooth migration from the Virtual design to the real manufacturing control

The virtual manufacturing concept is based on the use of computational resources during the design of products and manufacturing systems, reducing the ramp-up time to market and the costs for the system´s design, operation and reconfiguration. Combined with emergent paradigms for manufacturing control, such as multi-agent systems and service-orientation principles, and using a formal language to describe the system behavior, e.g. Petri nets, a truly and complete virtual production environment is achieved. This paper discusses this powerful approach to the virtual design and production environment driven by formal models, allowing users to design and deploy collaborative and reconfigurable automation applications in a faster and cost-effective fashion. A special attention is devoted to the process of migration from the virtual environment to the real world, aiming to reduce the transition time and increasing the efficiency of the process.