To handle the shift to electrical automobiles, elevated semiconductor demand, manufacturing onshoring, and ambitions for larger sustainability, producers are investing in new manufacturing facility developments and re-engineering their present amenities.
These initiatives typically run over price range and schedule, because of advanced and handbook planning processes, legacy know-how infrastructure, and disconnected instruments, information and groups.
To handle these challenges, producers are embracing digitalization and digital factories, powered by applied sciences like digital twins, the Common Scene Description (OpenUSD) ecosystem and generative AI, that allow new prospects from planning to operations.
What Is a Digital Manufacturing unit?
A digital manufacturing facility is a bodily correct illustration of an actual manufacturing facility. These digital twins of factories permit producers to mannequin, simulate, analyze and optimize their manufacturing processes, sources and operations with out the necessity for a bodily prototype or pilot plant.
Advantages of Digital Factories
Digital factories unlock many advantages and prospects for producers, together with:
- Streamlined Communication: As a substitute of groups counting on in-person conferences and static planning paperwork for undertaking alignment, digital factories streamline communication and make sure that essential design and operations selections are knowledgeable by probably the most present information.
- Contextualized Planning: Throughout facility design, development and commissioning, digital factories permit undertaking stakeholders to visualise designs within the context of the complete facility and manufacturing course of. Planning and operations groups can evaluate and confirm constructed constructions with the digital designs in actual time and reduce prices by figuring out errors and incorporating suggestions early within the evaluate course of.
- Optimized Facility Designs: Connecting digital factories to simulations of processes and discrete occasions allows groups to optimize facility designs for manufacturing and materials circulate, ergonomic work design, security and general utilization.
- Clever and Optimized Operations: Operations groups can combine their digital factories with worthwhile manufacturing information from Web of Issues know-how on the edge, and faucet AI to drive additional optimizations.
Digital Factories: A Testing Floor for AI and Robotics
Robotics builders are more and more utilizing digital factories to coach and check AI and autonomous methods that run in bodily factories. For instance, digital factories can allow builders and manufacturing groups to simulate digital staff and autonomous cell robots (AMRs), imaginative and prescient AI brokers and sensors to create a centralized map of employee exercise all through a facility. By fusing information from simulated digicam streams with multi-camera monitoring, builders can generate occupancy maps that inform optimum AMR routes.
Builders may use these bodily correct digital factories to coach and check AI brokers able to managing their robotic fleets, to make sure AI-enabled robots can adapt to real-world unpredictability and to establish streamlined configurations for human-robot collaboration.
What Are the Foundations of a Digital Manufacturing unit
Constructing large-scale, bodily correct digital factories that unlock these transformational prospects requires bringing collectively many instruments, information codecs and applied sciences to harmonize the illustration of real-world points within the digital world.
Initially invented by Pixar Animation Studios, OpenUSD encompasses a set of instruments and capabilities that allow the information interoperability builders and producers require to attain their digitalization objectives.
OpenUSD’s core superpower is versatile information modeling. 3D enter may be accepted from supply purposes and mixed with a wide range of information, together with from computer-aided design software program, dwell sensors, documentation and upkeep information, by a unified information pipeline. OpenUSD allows builders to share these information sorts throughout completely different simulation instruments and AI fashions, offering insights for all stakeholders. Information may be synced from the manufacturing facility flooring to the digital twin, surfacing real-time insights for manufacturing facility managers and groups.
By growing digital manufacturing facility options on OpenUSD, builders can improve collaboration for manufacturing facility groups, permitting them to evaluate plans, talk about optimization alternatives and make selections in actual time.
To help and speed up the event of the OpenUSD ecosystem, Pixar, Adobe, Apple, Autodesk and NVIDIA shaped the Alliance for OpenUSD, which is constructing open requirements for USD in core specification, supplies, geometry and extra.
Industrial Use Instances for Digital Factories
To unlock the potential of digital factories, {industry} leaders together with Autodesk, Continental, Pegatron, Rockwell Automation, Siemens and Wistron are growing virtual-factory options on OpenUSD and NVIDIA Omniverse, a platform of software programming interfaces (APIs) and software program improvement kits that allow builders to construct purposes for advanced 3D and industrial digitalization workflows primarily based on OpenUSD.
FlexSim, an Autodesk firm, makes use of OpenUSD to allow manufacturing facility groups to research, visualize and optimize real-world processes with its simulation modeling for advanced methods and operations. The discrete-event simulation software program gives an intuitive drag-and-drop interface to create 3D simulation fashions, account for real-world variability, run “what-if” eventualities and carry out in-depth analyses.
Builders at Continental, a number one German automotive know-how firm, developed ContiVerse, a manufacturing facility planning and manufacturing operations software on OpenUSD and NVIDIA Omniverse. The appliance helps Continental optimize manufacturing facility layouts and plan manufacturing processes collaboratively, resulting in an anticipated 13% discount in time to market.
Partnering with software program firm SoftServe, Continental additionally developed Industrial Co-Pilot, which mixes AI-driven insights with immersive visualization to ship real-time steerage and predictive analytics to engineers. That is anticipated to scale back upkeep effort and downtime by 10%.
Pegatron, one of many world’s largest producers of smartphones and shopper electronics, is growing virtual-factory options on OpenUSD to speed up the event of latest factories — in addition to to reduce change orders, optimize operations and maximize production-line throughput in present amenities.
Rockwell Automation is integrating NVIDIA Omniverse Cloud APIs and OpenUSD with its Emulate3D digital twin software program to convey manufacturing groups information interoperability, dwell collaboration and bodily primarily based visualization for designing, constructing and working industrial-scale digital twins of manufacturing methods.
Siemens, a number one know-how firm for automation, digitalization and sustainability and a member of the Alliance for OpenUSD, is adopting Omniverse Cloud APIs inside its Siemens Xcelerator Platform, beginning with Teamcenter X, the industry-leading cloud-based product lifecycle administration software program. This can assist groups design, construct and check next-generation merchandise, manufacturing processes and factories just about, earlier than they’re constructed within the bodily world.
Wistron, a number one world know-how service supplier and electronics producer, is digitalizing new and present factories with OpenUSD. By growing virtual-factory options on NVIDIA Omniverse, Wistron allows its manufacturing facility groups to collaborate remotely to refine format configurations, optimize floor mount know-how and in-circuit testing strains, and remodel product-on-dock testing.
With these options, Wistron has achieved a 51% enhance in employee effectivity and 50% discount in manufacturing course of instances. Structure optimization and real-time monitoring have decreased defect charges by 40%. And development time on Wistron’s new NVIDIA DGX manufacturing facility was lower in half, from about 5 months to simply two and a half months.
Study extra on the Digital Manufacturing unit Use Case web page, the place a reference structure gives an outline of parts and capabilities builders ought to take into account when growing virtual-factory options.
Get began with NVIDIA Omniverse by downloading the usual license free, entry OpenUSD sources, and learn the way Omniverse Enterprise can join your group. Keep updated on Instagram, Medium and X. For extra, be part of the Omniverse neighborhood on the boards, Discord server, Twitch and YouTube channels.
Featured video courtesy of Siemens.
