Högskolan i Skövde

Thanks to the advent of Industrial 4.0, automation, digitization, design, manufacturing and the production processes, have become the key to success and the cornerstone of manufacturing and marketing. Given that production is in a profound transformation stage with increasing global demand for products with specific uses tailored to customized needs, processes are also required to stay sync. This goal requires the adoption of advanced and pioneering technologies, and Virtual Commissioning (VC) is one of these tools that seek to achieve the best level of efficiency and benefit from the available assets. Virtual commissioning allows comprehensive testing of automation applications and provides a realistic training environment for operators even before the start of the factory, where these advanced technologies help to improve operations and retain knowledge, which leads to a reduction in operating time and a significant reduction in marketing time. There are three contributions in this thesis: firstly, systematic review methodology is applied to survey literature related to VC and it is found that the incorporation of virtual commissioning technology into manufacturing and automation is a large and huge field and has been widely discussed today in many recent research and studies. Then an industrial questionnaire is designed and conducted, totally 30 questionnaire forms are collected. Through data analysis, it is concluded that the virtual commissioning is a topic that has a lot of potential but is still in an early stage with some challenges to overcome, the application of virtual commissioning and its adoption by companies needs many capabilities, such as the availability of skills that must be available such as: competence skill of the employee on smart product, digital operation, IT infrastructure, data security, automation, data analytic, data exchange, application systems, and collaborative software. Finally, the key players in VC solutions and the comparison of their products are provided as a reference for potential applications.