A new tool for food industrial plant simulation and IoT control

The general objective of this research is to create a Simulation Software allowing the Optimization and Control of an IoT system for food industry applications. An industrial plant is today considered a complex system as it is often composed of many types of machines characterized by a strong temporal variation of the productions. The three missing factors to accomplish what above are: • Simulation; • Implementation of communicating objects also called IoT (Internet of Things) systems. • Intelligent control; In this paper, we show the tools developed and implemented in the Simulation software used to model a physical industrial process by mean of a user-friendly graphic interface allowing interactively defining different plant configurations, through the selection of basic graphic elements and their appropriate connection. The software has been developed in Unity, a cross-platform engine used to create three-dimensional, twodimensional, virtual reality, and augmented reality, as well as simulations. The software consists of the following main sections: • library; • creation and management of the process scheme; • simulation. The "library" section contains the elements (blocks) used in the process scheme, to be completed with functions describing their specific behaviour. These elements represent physical components and logical connectors that allow connecting the different blocks generating an oriented graph.The "creation and management of the process scheme" section is the graphical interface through which new configurations can be created. In particular, the connectors correspond to a flow of information from one block to another and contain the output variables determined by the function of the starting block. These values are used as input in the arrival block. The "simulation" section allows simulating of previously designed configurations.