Frost: A Simulation Platform for Early Validation and Testing of Manufacturing Software

The complexity of current manufacturing systems is growing, increasing the complexity of testing and validating control software. Manufacturing software must be extensively tested to minimize errors that may lead to production stops or machine breakdowns. However, testing on real manufacturing systems is often impractical or limited to small portions of the real systems. This paper presents Frost, an open-source platform supporting early manufacturing software validation and testing. Frost is built on top of the Lingua Franca framework, which ensures deterministic execution, enhancing the reliability of software prototyping and testing. The proposed platform implements a set of reactors and classes designed to model the different parts of a manufacturing system, such as sensors, machines, control software, and communication infrastructure. The effectiveness and capabilities of the Frost platform are validated by comparing the overhead introduced and by implementing a digital twin of a real manufacturing system.