To deal with the shift to electrical autos, elevated semiconductor demand, manufacturing onshoring, and ambitions for better sustainability, producers are investing in new manufacturing facility developments and re-engineering their present services.
These initiatives usually run over finances and schedule, as a consequence of complicated and handbook planning processes, legacy expertise infrastructure, and disconnected instruments, knowledge and groups.
To deal with 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 be sure that essential design and operations choices are knowledgeable by essentially the most present knowledge.
- Contextualized Planning: Throughout facility design, development and commissioning, digital factories permit undertaking stakeholders to visualise designs within the context of all the facility and manufacturing course of. Planning and operations groups can examine and confirm constructed constructions with the digital designs in actual time and reduce prices by figuring out errors and incorporating suggestions early within the evaluation 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 movement, ergonomic work design, security and general utilization.
- Clever and Optimized Operations: Operations groups can combine their digital factories with priceless manufacturing knowledge from Web of Issues expertise 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 take a look at AI and autonomous programs that run in bodily factories. For instance, digital factories can allow builders and manufacturing groups to simulate digital employees and autonomous cellular robots (AMRs), imaginative and prescient AI brokers and sensors to create a centralized map of employee exercise all through a facility. By fusing knowledge from simulated digicam streams with multi-camera monitoring, builders can generate occupancy maps that inform optimum AMR routes.
Builders can even use these bodily correct digital factories to coach and take a look at AI brokers able to managing their robotic fleets, to make sure AI-enabled robots can adapt to real-world unpredictability and to determine 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, knowledge codecs and applied sciences to harmonize the illustration of real-world features 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 realize their digitalization targets.
OpenUSD’s core superpower is versatile knowledge modeling. 3D enter may be accepted from supply purposes and mixed with quite a lot of knowledge, together with from computer-aided design software program, stay sensors, documentation and upkeep information, by way of a unified knowledge pipeline. OpenUSD allows builders to share these knowledge sorts throughout completely different simulation instruments and AI fashions, offering insights for all stakeholders. Knowledge may be synced from the manufacturing facility ground to the digital twin, surfacing real-time insights for manufacturing facility managers and groups.
By creating digital manufacturing facility options on OpenUSD, builders can improve collaboration for manufacturing facility groups, permitting them to evaluation plans, focus on optimization alternatives and make choices in actual time.
To assist and speed up the event of the OpenUSD ecosystem, Pixar, Adobe, Apple, Autodesk and NVIDIA fashioned 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 creating virtual-factory options on OpenUSD and NVIDIA Omniverse, a platform of utility programming interfaces (APIs) and software program improvement kits that allow builders to construct purposes for complicated 3D and industrial digitalization workflows based mostly 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 complicated programs and operations. The discrete-event simulation software program supplies 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 expertise firm, developed ContiVerse, a manufacturing facility planning and manufacturing operations utility on OpenUSD and NVIDIA Omniverse. The applying 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 steering and predictive analytics to engineers. That is anticipated to cut back upkeep effort and downtime by 10%.
Pegatron, one of many world’s largest producers of smartphones and shopper electronics, is creating 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 services.
Rockwell Automation is integrating NVIDIA Omniverse Cloud APIs and OpenUSD with its Emulate3D digital twin software program to convey manufacturing groups knowledge interoperability, stay collaboration and bodily based mostly visualization for designing, constructing and working industrial-scale digital twins of manufacturing programs.
Siemens, a number one expertise 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. It will assist groups design, construct and take a look at next-generation merchandise, manufacturing processes and factories just about, earlier than they’re constructed within the bodily world.
Wistron, a number one world expertise service supplier and electronics producer, is digitalizing new and present factories with OpenUSD. By creating virtual-factory options on NVIDIA Omniverse, Wistron allows its manufacturing facility groups to collaborate remotely to refine structure configurations, optimize floor mount expertise and in-circuit testing strains, and remodel product-on-dock testing.
With these options, Wistron has achieved a 51% increase in employee effectivity and 50% discount in manufacturing course of occasions. Format 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.
Be taught extra on the Digital Manufacturing unit Use Case web page, the place a reference structure supplies an outline of parts and capabilities builders ought to contemplate when creating 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 workforce. Keep updated on Instagram, Medium and X. For extra, be part of the Omniverse neighborhood on the boards, Discord server, Twitch and YouTube channels.
