Virtualisation – Making Machines and Lines Efficient and Cost Effective
Published on : Tuesday 07-07-2020
Praveen Vaidya elaborates upon how machines and lines can be made efficient and cost effective with virtualisation.
Today with new emerging technologies, individualisation has caught the eye of consumers, giving rise to customised products. To be able to cope with these requirements, plant operators have to shorten time to market and become more efficient and flexible, while maintaining or even improving product quality. However, while trying to make production more agile, complexity of machines and lines, time for software development and commissioning is increasing. Virtualisation or Digital Twin is a perfect solution to overcome this challenge. By providing companies with a complete digital footprint of machines, lines, shop floor or products, digital twin enables companies to detect physical issues sooner, predict outcomes more accurately, and build better products with superior quality. Virtualisation is very powerful allowing the visibility of machine operations as well as large interconnected manufacturing systems. The digital twin model can be even used to predict the future state of machines and lines.
Digital Twin: A smart choice for digital transformation
Digital twin is essentially a combination of data and intelligence, representing the structure, behaviour, and context of a physical system of any type. Digital twin provides an interface that allows understanding the past and present operations of physical devices and systems and helping to predict the future. They help optimise the physical world and improve operational performance and business processes. Most of the companies get unstructured data when any device or a mechanical instrument fails or are about to fail. Companies follow static, read and react approach. It is a virtual representation of a physical asset, which reduces anticipations and guesswork and works on actual data. Digital twin is already being used today in a variety of industries including manufacturing, automotive, energy, transportation, construction and many more. Companies in these sectors are leveraging digital twin to optimise operation, asset performance and maintenance of machine and factories. Industrial assets generate millions of data points. Integrating a digital twin with data generated from physical assets enables machine builders to decide whether or not to replace a device. An engineer can always update the parameters online so that the digital version matches the physical one.
A digital twin can have several benefits including the ability to run in-line with the real machine to enable rapid task-planning and early detection of potential problems. Moreover, a digital twin application can even start while starting a prototype of a new machine or a line. OEMs and factories can build a digital replica of any machine and line, observe and simulate its functioning. This helps technical team to easily freeze technical specifications of electronic and mechanical components and see feasibility even before actual product machining and purchase. It is observed that such advancements have drastically reduced manufacturing costs, wastage and improved efficiencies.
Digital twin enables continuous process improvements, design improvements, operations, maintenance and conditional states of any machine. The implementation of enterprise asset management and lifecycle service strategy, around the concept of digital twin and within the overall Industrial IoT ecosystem, can provide significant benefits to machine builders. By integrating, a digital twin of the machine design on a real-time platform helps accelerating commissioning, reducing risks and decreasing costs by configuring and testing in parallel with the real machine. Digital twin is one of the primary trends affecting industrial businesses positively, today as well as will continue to do so in the future. Industries pushing to modernise their systems and equipment must plan for incorporating such trends in their strategies.
Empowering machine builders with digital twin
The concept of digital twin solves many of the manufacturer’s needs for observing and tracking what is happening on the shop floor at a micro level. Machine builders can leverage this for faster time to market and reducing development costs. The machine builder usually develops a concept, builds mechanics, integrates electrical and automation components in the system. At this point, he starts developing the software. Due to this, the software team get a very short time for development. In case of the need of rework in mechanics or concept, time as well as huge cost is incurred and eventually machine builders are unable to maintain the deadlines. With digital twin, B&R helps machine builders to virtually develop and test machines without the need of actual mechanics and electronics.
Conventionally, machine and line building starts with a design concept on paper making its way to the shop floor for machining of products. In parallel, automation teams use the available designs for electrical drawing as well as finalising electronics suitable for these systems. Only after the mechanical structure is ready, the electrical teams start working on these machines and software personnel come last. Usually it was observed that if mechanical and electrical teams exceed timelines then software personnel are left with less time for programming and commissioning systems. Moreover, it is understood during programming and testing that a particular choice of motor or drive was incorrect and needs higher ratings for achieving the desired performance. It might also be possible that a mechanics machined for movement is not able to sustain speed as desired by machine builder. This usually leads to either ordering new electronics or rework in machining mechanics as case in the later. This not only results in material wastage but also leads to higher costs and lost time. Digital twin and virtualisation best satisfy these needs of machine building helping them to reduce operational and manufacturing costs as well as achieve quick time to market and higher profitability.
Virtualisation made easy with B&R
In the age of Industrial IoT, concepts like modelling, simulation and virtual commissioning are quickly becoming standard procedure in the development of automation technology. Seamlessly networked development tools, unprecedented flexibility and highly efficient resource management promise to optimise development process and get projects up and running significantly faster. B&R supports model-based development at whatever level of detail it is implemented – with modelling, simulation and virtual commissioning woven into entire product portfolio.
Automation studio the single tool for programming all B&R components has an inbuilt simulation environment, which enables simulation of controls, I/Os and even motion components. Apart from hardware, software and technology scalability with B&R system, machine builders can simulate the entire electronics even before they receive the hardware. In addition, development of machine software is platform independent. Using MapleSim and MATLAB® /Simulink®, machine builders can even simulate mechanics for dynamic modelling of machines and machine components. This simulation can be then imported in Automation studio, enabling machine builders to have a simulation environment down to mechanics. Early testing and virtual commissioning can help keep errors in check despite increasingly complex application code. Simulated control systems linked to virtual machine components make it possible to verify application code long before the first prototype machine goes into operation. Machine builders with B&R virtual commissioning can accelerate and streamline the process of commissioning the actual machine. This minimises risk and ensures reliably meeting project deadlines and quality targets. At the highest level, it is possible to simulate complex system processes such as material flow or entire production plants. To make this possible, Automation Studio features interfaces for external tools such as industrialPhysics and ISG-virtuos.
Smart manufacturing with B&R
To remain competitive digital transformation is the need of the hour. B&R offers complete hardware and software solutions, comprehensive service and expertise in automation and digitalisation of machinery. With dedicated technology and open source communication standards such as OPC UA, POWERLINK and openSAFETY as well as the powerful Automation Studio software development environment, B&R is right partner for an organisations digital transformation journey.
Praveen Vaidya is Manager – Key Accounts, at B&R Industrial Automation. Praveen is Technical Team Member, with experience in Project Planning and Execution and Automation Solutions provider. He has experience in field of automation of more than 18 years.