Our team specializes in applying simulation methods to manufacturing and production systems, processes, facilities and enterprises.
#INSPECTION IN PLANT SIMULATION MANUAL#
The cost model for financial impacts, evaluating saved manual labor, increased electrical utilization, maintenance costs, and increased revenue can all be metrics monitored and evaluated to provide a holistic report on the ROI and financial impact to the facility. For example, in the evaluation of a new robotic cell, simulation tools can evaluate the cycle times gained through the new process, and how that will impact the overall process for increased throughput on final products. However, before moving forward with a big investment in these innovative technologies, an evaluation needs to be conducted on the specific improvements gained and when that ROI will be reached. Robotics, Automated Guided Vehicles (AGVs) and other industrial equipment are continuing to change manufacturing and offer important benefits to companies. This is much faster, cheaper, and easier to do virtually using a simulation tool.Ī popular trend that is occurring within manufacturing today is in the investment of automation equipment for a facility. Due to the time, effort, and costs involved in making physical changes, it is critical to ensure that the changes being made are correct for the facility and will meet the desired outcome. These scenarios allow us to make virtual changes to a facility and evaluate those changes before any physical work is done. Running a simulation of a plant allows engineers to discover these crucial factors to give better insight into how well they are currently performing. This means determining true capacity, identifying bottlenecks and generating key performance indicators may be limited or non-existent in some facilities. There are many times a facility is running production, but due to the complexities of the processes and extensive number of variables and constraints in the system, it is very difficult to comprehend all the moving parts.
To better understand how a facility is currently running.There are two main reasons why we would want to build a virtual twin of a facility and run simulations against it: Source: Siemens Tecnomatix Plant Simulation Why Do We Simulate a Plant? This concept of leveraging simulation tools to take a design of a plant and understand it’s behavior is a critical aspect of the Digital Thread story. Any potential changes can be evaluated and analyzed. A Digital Twin can be modeled and then simulated to understand how well it will perform. This same Digital Thread concept can be applied to the manufacturing plant. This model will then be used downstream to feed the Digital Thread of the product, leveraging that data to help in the manufacturing planning and execution. That model then goes through engineering simulation tests to validate that it will behave and perform as expected.
When a new product is introduced, a virtual twin of that product is developed in CAD to create a model. The need to simulate an existing or newly planned facility is fundamental to the Digital Twin and Digital Thread concept for Industry 4.0.