Digital engineering isn’t an all-or-nothing strategy. You don’t need to replace the tools that your workers know and like today. Instead, extend those tools digitally to improve how designers, production managers, technicians and others work.
You just need to review your business and determine where you can do things smarter, faster or better using a digital approach. To help you do this, here are five key areas where digital engineering can improve your business:
- Design and prototyping
- Commissioning
- Operator training
- Production
- Maintenance
Design and Prototyping
When you can build, test and prove machine designs digitally — while pencil is still on paper, you can change what’s possible in your business.
Virtual design and prototyping can help:
- Get machines to market faster
- Reduce risk in designs
- Create higher-caliber, more customized machines
With simulation software, manufacturers can apply physics to their 3D CAD model to bring it to life. Watch it run and see how it interacts with people or with other machines.
You can even bring the model into a virtual reality (VR) environment, observing it from a plant-floor view. What if you could stand in front of your HMI on the floor before you even build? Imagine how much time you could save if you could operate your system before the design was finalized.
Changes can be made in digital design with just a few clicks rather than buying parts and spending days of labor to build a new prototype. You can even emulate programmable logic controllers using solutions like FactoryTalk® Logix Echo. With its new workflows, the emulation software can help manufacturers move from design to test in an instant and save significant engineering effort.
And it’s not just digital twins that can help get machines to market faster. Reusable code allows manufacturers to build off the success of existing machines without redesigning from scratch.
Think beyond programming controls. The rise of simulation software means that almost anything can be digitally modeled. For instance, if you create a behavioral model of a turbine or a pumping station, Studio 5000® Simulation Interface can connect that model directly to your running Logix code. Run your program with simulation-driven tag values that allows you to recreate what your program will face in the real world.
Commissioning
Waiting to bring a machine onsite to perform controls testing is flirting with disaster. You won’t know if your machine and its control system are aligned until you’re standing next to your customer, with their start-up deadline approaching. You may discover that your machine operates below expectations or doesn’t meet the spec. And fixing these issues at the last minute can be expensive and lead to missed start-up deadlines — and possibly strained relationships.
Virtual commissioning can help put an end to these problems. By creating a dynamic digital twin of both your machine design and the real operational logic of the control system, you can uncover issues earlier in the design phase — long before you bolt your machine into the floor of a customer’s plant. You can exhaustively verify and demonstrate the operation of your machine and the controller before any resources are committed to them.
Operator Training
Training does not need to happen only after both machines and operators are onsite together.
With virtual training, you can use a digital twin to train workers before a machine arrives. By either sliding on a VR headset or working from a screen, workers can build skills and competency in a safe and immersive virtual environment. Perhaps the greatest benefit of virtual training is the freedom it offers.
You don’t need to send workers to a training site or wait for equipment to become available. Instead, training can be provided to whoever needs it, whenever they need it, wherever they need it.
Virtual training doesn’t have the same restrictions as real-world training. Workers can learn how to keep production running in ideal operations. And they can be put to the test with simulated faults and extreme conditions that may not be possible to physically replicate. This can better prepare them for responding to similar incidents in production and ultimately reduce downtime.
Workers can be free to make mistakes in virtual training without worrying about disrupting production. If an operator does something wrong, that action can be recorded for remediation purposes. And they can be required to prove their competency in training before they experience live production.
Operations
Once production starts, digital twins can mimic processes, machines and controls to help plant personnel learn about operations and experiment with changes. And an ever-growing digital thread of information can reveal insights into how production can be improved.
Operations of all types can reach new heights when they can:
- Continuously drive improvements in production and adjust on the fly using insights from their digital thread
- Trial line startups and production scheduling and sequencing to optimize product mixes and volumes
- Experiment with machine configurations to improve quality, reliability and throughput
- Detect anomalies in processes to uncover operational issues before they impact quality and cause scrap or downtime
- Test run new products or machines to optimize throughput and avoid problems like downstream bottlenecks
- Fly through virtual recreations of large operations like mines to look and listen for equipment issues rather than physically traversing the operations
- Create a virtual sensor to estimate a value that may otherwise require expensive instruments or manual readings to determine
Maintenance
Maintenance teams can fight downtime like never before using digital simulations and real-time (or even predictive) insights.
Data flowing through a digital thread can help technicians detect problems as they happen, to prevent or minimize downtime. This includes health and diagnostic data from control system devices that can notify technicians when maintenance is needed. But it also includes network data, for example, from switch-level alarms, which today is just as critical to uptime.
In an ideal world, maintenance teams would never need to respond to downtime events because they could predict them. This is increasingly possible thanks to the use of predictive analytics. These analytics use machine learning and artificial intelligence to learn your operations, identify machine issues early and alert technicians of those issues. Technicians can then schedule maintenance during a planned downtime.
Digital twins can help improve MTTR in a couple key ways. First, virtual training allows technicians to prepare for downtime problems in advance rather than troubleshooting them the first time they happen. And when problems do happen, technicians can use augmented reality (AR) technology to overlay digital diagnostics or work instructions on a physical machine to diagnose and fix problems faster.
