Over the last few decades, the complexity and variety of automation systems have increased dramatically. Commissioning has grown more and more critical for the entire industry. Conventional commissioning is time-consuming and expensive.

It's always been a challenge in manufacturing to put new designs into production or implement new technologies, control codes, or tactics.

In Virtual Commissioning (VC), control programs of the physical system's Digital Twin (DT) can be validated in Software-in-the-Loop (SIL) before the actual commissioning.

The emergence of new VC tools and methods has become a tremendous advantage, bringing the values of shorter duration, flexibility, and lower risks to the commissioning process.

In this thesis, advanced process control was developed using the software Matlab and Simulink in conjunction with the engineering tools S7-PLCSIM Advanced and STEP 7 TIA Portal to conduct VC.

A VC approach with four key steps is taken to evaluate the possibility of validating advanced process control. The steps are modeling DT of a rolling mill, model-based control design, simulation model development in Simulink, communication between the simulation model and the PLC program using S-7 TIA Portal, and PLCSIM Advanced. Also, a simulated Human-Machine Interface was designed to operate and visualize the process.

VC of the rolling mill process was verified and validated by Model-in-the-Loop (MIL) and SIL simulation. The simulation gives satisfactory results as both MIL and SIL show identical outputs of the process.