The manufacturers of industrial equipment often need to validate dynamically the behavior of their special machines. He needs to connect a virtual plant to the PLC(s). In Industry 4.0, this activity is named virtual commissioning.

ControlBuild is a great tool for virtual commissioning, but the 3D representation is not integrated and the user has to rebuild the plant model in ControlBuild. The idea is to reuse the 3D SolidWorks model already created for the machine design to connect it to the PLC through ControlBuild.

We are now able to perform this kind of co-simulation including ControlBuild and SolidWorks thank to a new connector. ControlBuild provides great performance of functional simulation and connection to PLC, and SolidWorks perform a very precise 3D model.

The two possible architectures are the following, depending of the integration of the PLC:

The following video shows a demo of this new functionality of ControlBuild