PID Controller tuning by Virtual Commissioning - A step to Industry 4.0

This paper deals with the validation of the concept of using virtual commissioning of the low-level industrial control systems to adjust PID controller settings. General hardware configurations and logical layers of the experimental setups, which were used during the experiments, are shown and described in details. It is shown how to determine the controller settings using pre-tuning and fine-tuning functionality, available in standard Siemens® Function Blocks Library, that have been launched in virtual commissioning environment. Comparison of the results is a basis to answer the question if the modern virtual commissioning tools currently used in industry have sufficient accuracy to be used as a master tool for the initial PID controller tuning. It is also important to know whether these systems are suitable for use as Industry 4.0 tools, as the simulation is one of its most important part.