More than a Mockup

A functional design of production facilities and its time or cost-optimal realization is only possible by support of all experts, which are involved within development of this facility. Typically, such planning is done nowadays by means of virtual commissioning. This leads often to large amount of data, which needs to be exchanged between several companies and lastly heterogeneous engineering tools. Currently there are two main obstacles within exchange of data. Firstly, the actual available tools usually consider only a part of the data needed for the overall process and secondly the consistency of the data cannot be guaranteed. This paper presents an innovative approach seeking to improve interdisciplinary and cross-company collaboration planning as well as product-related virtual optimization of automated production systems. Required data exchange will be handled by a development kit, which can be used to extend existing software to support the developed system.