The role of industrial partnerships with MBSE
Businesses today require many more digital tools and software to operate successfully than ever before. This might come from market pressures to deliver faster, competition from other businesses on cost, or from greater complexity in development. This is felt in nearly every industry, but especially so in manufacturing. All three of these drivers are pushing manufacturing businesses towards digitalization and specifically model-based systems engineering (MBSE) faster than ever, but while Siemens has a wide breadth of competence with all of the digital tools under the Siemens Xcelerator portfolio there are still ways to improve the solution for customers. That is why the partnership with NVIDIA is important, as factories work out the future of manufacturing in the metaverse.
An accurate model
Our tools enable the industry’s most comprehensive digital twin, representing every domain of development and their interconnection – mechanical, electrical/electronic, and even software. This helps customers create cutting-edge smart products and production processes more rapidly, reducing time to market and development costs. The precise virtual representation of both the physical product and the associated processes match the physical form, function, and behavior. The digital twin of the process is also continuously optimized via real-time data streaming from the shop floor through industrial edge devices. Optimization is the major goal of an MBSE workflow, the software tools make it more efficient.
But visualizing and refining this data requires computational resources that need to be able to scale with the business. Using the performance of NVIDIA Omniverse, multi-domain visualization and 3D collaboration are brought to life. Integrating both product and production digital twins from Siemens, the visualization retains accurate physicality while providing a high fidelity, digital version of the floor before the real thing is constructed. When downtime can run up millions of dollars in lost revenue, having a digital version to optimize and train on is a no-brainer for many manufacturing businesses.
A wide solution space
The ability to explore, test, and validate potential solutions for increasing yields or improving efficiency without impacting current operations is critical to reducing downtime and providing manufacturing agility. But the partnership also provides a space to explore human-robot collaboration on an increasingly automated shop floor. Artificial intelligence is being used by many systems to intelligently adjust for efficient and safe operations around humans, but that requires training. The digital shopfloor is one part of that equation, but NVIDIA Omniverse provides the scalability to reach these result faster than before. Robot systems can train on physically accurate synthetic data pulled directly from the comprehensive digital twin.
The digital exploration space provides access to a closed loop of the manufacturing process. Data streaming from the real line can refine the digital representation and inch the real thing closer and closer to the ideal scenario outlined by MBSE practices and the system architecture. It covers safety and every single engineering discipline for a robust and accurate representation of the digital and physical worlds.
An open future
In the quest to create the best industrial processes of the future, it is unlikely it will be done single handedly. Companies will need to lean on technology and resource partners for many industries, whether to define complexity of the product at hand or provide expertise on the solution. The support networks combined with more complex products will create opportunities in an open future, but the most successful will require the best tools for the job. MBSE is just that for any company dealing with systems of systems, electrification, increased regulatory pressure, or any combination of the three. A rigorous methodology provides stability and repeatability in selecting the right balance for the best product iteration. It must connect not just businesses, but their tools and procedures for find that optimal point, which is why industrial partnerships are so important to building tomorrow, today.
For more details on the partnership, you may want to read Dirk Didascalou’s impressions in Creating the Industrial Metaverse: Siemens Xcelerator + NVIDIA Omniverse.
Siemens Digital Industries Software is driving transformation to enable a digital enterprise where engineering, manufacturing and electronics design meet tomorrow. Xcelerator, the comprehensive and integrated portfolio of software and services from Siemens Digital Industries Software, helps companies of all sizes create and leverage a comprehensive digital twin that provides organizations with new insights, opportunities and levels of automation to drive innovation.
For more information on Siemens Digital Industries Software products and services, visit siemens.com/software or follow us on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.
Siemens Digital Industries Software – Where today meets tomorrow
