Given the worldwide economic recession, manufacturers are under pressure to become more resourceful and agile. As a result, companies are starting to take a serious look at the value of incorporating more simulation and visualization into design-to-production processes so that they can see and test production setups before actually making new production investments.
Technology vendors are taking note and introducing products that move manufacturing closer to the virtual reality of the digital factory.
While industry experts say we are still some years away from technology tools that support a soup-to-nuts digital manufacturing environment, many vendors are coming up with point solutions that offer ways to close the loop between the design of a product and actual production. Vendors are finding, however, that integrating those point solutions into a unified whole is a challenge, in part because the software programs that drive the different domains — CAD and control — usually haven't been designed to communicate with one another. In addition, an integrated digital factory environment must be able to manage the information that's generated by the different applications involved. That's why product lifecycle management (PLM) is an important application to include in the digital factory discussion.
Automation and PLM leader Siemens is one vendor that is going back to the drawing board to create a turnkey solution that incorporates all of these technologies in a tightly integrated offering. Meanwhile PLM software provider Dassault Systèmes, which has partnerships with Rockwell Automation, Omron Corp., and Schneider Electric on the control side, as well as iBASEt and Intercim on the manufacturing operations management side, is offering manufacturers multiple digital factory entry points.
In addition, Dassault and other vendors, such as Autodesk and Invensys Process Systems, offer visualization tools that virtualize the factory floor experience.
The digital factory concept, at its core, is about modeling and integrating design and production processes. The challenge, however, is keeping digital models in sync with the physical world, particularly the plant floor, where change is constant. Often, as soon as the physical plant is running, the digital model diverges from what's going on in the real world, says Patrick Michel, Dassault's vice president of Delmia industry solutions and marketing. "Everyone is working to extend [the digital model] to have a permanent view of the accurate state of what is being built, as well as to incorporate knowledge sharing [between engineering and manufacturing]," he says.
The work being done by Delmia and Intercim, for example, will tightly integrate Dassault's V6 PLM architecture, specifically its Delmia digital manufacturing software — which includes early process planning, modeling, and simulation of assembly lines — with Intercim's Pertinence software suite for executing processes, tracking workflow, and managing quality during production.
The goal is to align manufacturing with engineering and PLM, the companies say. Specifically, that means creating an "as built" model that can tie back to the "as designed" model using a common language.
"You can see a virtual representation of the factory, take a snapshot of that, and simulate scenario changes before spending any money," says Judson Plapp, Intercim's vice president of marketing and corporate strategy. "That's the point of closing the loop. Getting real data and feeding that back to engineering."
Dassault made a minority investment in Intercim in order to facilitate the sharing of intellectual property (IP) and to ensure tight integration between the two companies' technologies. But Dassault is also working with iBASEt on an integrated offering — absent any kind of financial investment.
Both iBASEt and Intercim cater to the aerospace and defense industry. In aerospace, work instructions must include process definitions. There is a desire to automate work instruction definition as much as possible, says Conrad Leiva, vice president of product marketing and alliances at iBASEt. Simulation and animation are becoming integral to managing production processes in this industry.
But even this must be approached cautiously. "The expectation is to leverage simulation, but, at the same time, you don't want to simulate everything. Some things are simple and intuitive, and you don't need to simulate it," as simulation adds more cost into the equation, Leiva says.
Sensible Simulation
Simulation does not have to be applied everywhere, but there are certain areas of the design-to-manufacturing process where it can simplify the overall effort.
For example, in another attempt to tie together equipment control and engineering, Rockwell Automation teamed up with Dassault's Delmia over a year ago, and today Rockwell sells a utility, called RSLogix 5000 version 17, that creates bidirectional synchronization between Rockwell control systems and the Delmia digital manufacturing software. Together, the technologies act as a framework for mapping out production systems, saving time in production planning. But the utility also improves quality by simulating what-if scenarios before a product rollout.
"Up until this point, systems were integrated using tools to build 3D models, and it was dumped into the control system," says Jason Weber, strategic alliance manager at Rockwell Automation. "It saves time initially, but as soon as it's done, it's broken because there is no link back and forth. If something changes on the mechanical side, you have to send an e-mail or walk over to make sure everyone knows what the changes are," he says.
This wastes time, Weber says. But by synchronizing mechanical engineering and control information in a common object database, there is a bidirectional communication between systems that updates all files immediately when changes occur. "For end users, there is less error as you get the machine or work cell up and running. That is a big win in efficiency and time to production," he says.
For its part, Siemens two years ago acquired UGS, resulting in what is now called the Siemens PLM business unit. Currently, work is ongoing behind the scenes at Siemens on a project, dubbed Archimedes, that will integrate all of the aspects that Dassault is attempting with multiple partners, but it will be under one Siemens-based architecture, using the company's Teamcenter PLM as the data management platform.
Project Archimedes — which is still under wraps at Siemens — could take a while to become a reality, industry observers say. But manufacturers don't have to wait to reap the benefits, as there are aspects of the digital factory that exist in the Siemens product portfolio today.
For example, Tecnomatix is branded as the company's "digital manufacturing solution." The Tecnomatix strategy started in 1983, when the company developed software initially intended to help BMW speed up the planning of its production lines. Since then, Tecnomatix has added simulation for verifying processes and is able to transfer the processes to the shop floor. Tecnomatix, however, does not complete the feedback loop that ties the production lifecycle back to design and PLM. This adaptive approach — from concept, to design, to automation, and back —requires integration among Siemens CAD/CAE, simulation, PLM, MES, and control architectures.
Nevertheless, the benefits of Tecnomatix alone are significant.
"It makes planning more efficient, ramp-up shorter, safer, and we are also providing a lot of technology to optimize the manufacturing processes on the lines by increasing the throughput of the lines, [but] in a way that minimizes the investment," says Stefan Linner, vice president of Tecnomatix product marketing at Siemens PLM Software.
To that end, there are many examples of customers saving millions of dollars as a result of using the Tecnomatix software, he says. "Digital manufacturing is a reality, and many customers out there are getting a lot of value [out of what's available today]," he says.
Factory Animation
A good starting point for manufacturers wanting to get their digital feet wet would be to map out the factory floor. Autodesk's NavisWorks software, for example, takes a digital prototype of a product and extends it into a virtual prototype of production, accounting for collision detection and clearance analysis as a product moves down the line.
"It is not at the level of doing PLC and robotic validation yet," says Hilde Sevens, senior product manager of the Autodesk Manufacturing CIM group. "But it does factory layout and optimization." And it is easy enough for the casual user to use, she says.
Similarly, Next View Software Inc. offers a data-driven visualization tool for managing warehouses or yards. including material handling and labor management. Based on Microsoft Corp.'s XNA framework, which is the foundation of Xbox, Next View created a tool that can be put into the hands of a kid just coming out of high school.
"We believe software applications of the future will have to look, feel, and behave different than they have in the past," says Steve Simmerman, head of business development at Next View.
The company's software takes real-time feeds from the warehouse to show what is happening in the facility. "We build a scale model based on XYZ coordinates ... that can take a bird's eye view as you fly into the facility or dissolve ceilings and walls and let you see the forklift people moving in real time," he says.
The system takes information from labor management systems in order to identify who is logged in and what equipment they are using. It can also track the material flow based on purchase orders from an ERP system. In addition, it can tie into transportation networks and MES software to show the status of manufacturing.
The Next View visualization software can be used to simulate the build-out of a facility. "If you want to double the size of the warehouse, our modeling software can take real data and assess the impact on the facility," Simmerman says.
While this kind of real-time visualization has been used in discrete industries, where packaged goods come off a line, Invensys Process Systems in February unveiled its own virtual reality technology for the oil and gas and chemical industries.
Invensys' Immersive Virtual Reality Process Technology is a next-generation human-machine interface (HMI) tool that couples dynamic simulation software with a high-fidelity, 3D model of the plant that is enabled by a virtual reality engine. The tool is primarily used for training operators. Users wear a stereoscopic headset, immersing them in an environment that allows them to move freely through the plant and see all of the equipment and instrumentation as it appears in real life. Complex processes can be simulated to teach an operator how to take down a plant, for example, in case of an emergency.
The technology, which will be commercially available in the second half this year, also has the potential to link to actual plant operations. "In the future of HMI, for example, the virtual reality environment may not be linking only to a simulation system, but also to real-life data," says Maurizio Rovaglio, director, Invensys global consulting. But he concedes that is still a futuristic concept.
Indeed, today there is much about the digital factory concept that is futuristic. But, while vendors have yet to provide a set of fully integrated tools that can support every aspect of the digital factory, their point products take much of the complexity out of directly integrating product and production models.
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