Modification of Field Bus Telegrams for Hybrid Commissioning; Merge-Tool for PROFIBUS

The commissioning of production plants is still a critical phase and represents a high percentage of the overall engineering process. The Hybrid Commissioning method is a new approach to increase the efficiency of the commissioning, i.e. to reduce costs and the danger of damages. Hybrid Commissioning starts with a simulation of the complete plant and the components of the simulated plant are substituted stepwise by their real counterparts. Especially for field bus driven production plants, this kind of parallel operation poses a challenge. Therefore, a supporting tool system with a specific architecture is necessary. In order to combine signal values of real and simulated components within this architecture in a useful way, a so called Merge-Tool has been developed. In this paper, the Merge-Tool, its requirements, its functionality, and its implementation for PROFIBUS driven production plants are described.