The Virtual Commissioning (VC) technology is the latest trend in automotive assembly which, among other benefits, promises a more efficient handling of the complexity in assembly systems, a great reduction in the system’s ramp-up time, and a resulting shortening of the product’s time to market. This paper presents the application of VC techniques to the case of an industrial robotic cell, involving cooperating robots. The complete workflow of the virtual validation of the cell is presented, and the implementation requirements are discussed. Based on the findings, the outlook and challenges for the wide-range adoption of VC technologies in large-scale assembly systems are provided. 1. Introduction As product life cycles are reduced in the continuously changing marketplace, modern manufacturing systems should have sufficient responsiveness to adapt their behaviours efficiently to a wide range of circumstances [1]. In this context, one of the main challenges that modern assembly systems are faced with, is the cost-driven demand for faster and more secure ramp-up processes. This goal is however underpinned by the constantly rising number of rampups, due to enhanced innovations and the increasing market launches of new products and product variants. The current trend followed by the automotive original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), as highlighted by B？r [2], is the adoption of product, equipment, and process standardization. Nevertheless, this standardization is not by itself capable of guaranteeing that the designed assembly and production systems will be fully operational after their physical deployment. The complexity and diversity of the different line components, in terms of control systems and communication channels, requires a great amount of time for onsite setup, testing, and validation of the assembly equipment. This in turn, is translated into production system downtime and the respective opportunity costs that follow it. Digital simulation of the assembly process has emerged over the last decades as a means of partially handling the validation of such systems prior to their installation. IT systems have been over the past years an evolutionary technology, forwarding the concepts of digital manufacturing. These systems are based on the digital factory/manufacturing concept, according to which production data management systems and simulation technologies are jointly used for optimizing manufacturing before starting the production and supporting the ramp-up phases [2, 3]. However, the current situation in the “digital factory” concept seems to be
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