Digital Twins: Transport your Operations to the Digital World

As consumers demand new products and more variety, companies are racing against the clock to deliver. Speed to market is key to getting ahead of the game. A virtual environment can help you gain significant launch-time advantages.

Traditional methods of machine and production line design, commissioning and startup can be costly and impede speed to market. Discovering issues with controls integration, line sequencing or bottlenecks after machines are built or lines reconfigured is not the best time as it often results in installation and commissioning delays.

Manufacturers are turning to emulation as a tool to research, test and validate their process in a virtual space – before making physical changes to plant layout and workflow. Employing a virtual system that uses real operational logic and connects to PLCs can help minimize the resources required to bring a line from design to production. Producers commonly report a reduction in onsite controls commissioning times from three weeks to four days on a bottling line. This scale of reduction is typical, and is a big factor in driving adoption.

Embrace the possibilities

Have you ever wondered what would happen if you increased throughput by 10 percent? How would the control system respond if you change the mix of products? With factory floor virtualization, you can experiment and troubleshoot. An emulation model can easily be built for your existing lines, allowing for ongoing testing of new configurations and product types. Essentially, you can push the system to its breaking point, without any consequence, damage or interruption to the real thing.

The possibilities virtualization holds for reducing speed to market for manufacturers is becoming more accepted for multiple reasons including:

• Emulation technology is more attainable. Not only are more 3D drawings available, but creating your own model can be easy using drag-and-drop software.
• Your workforce is ready.  Industrial engineers are coming out of school trained on this technology. They are even building cases for leadership given their understanding of the potential virtualization holds.
• Plug and play expectations are growing. As automation becomes more reliable, there is an expectation to create production lines that work from the start, without months of ramp.
• Seeing is believing. The ability to see a virtual operation in context, using augmented reality and today’s realistic visuals, makes your vision more believable, to more stakeholders.

Emulate3D™, by Rockwell Automation is an innovative engineering software developer whose products digitally simulate and emulate industrial automation systems. By using accurate simulation models to improve systems planning and decision-making, followed by emulation trials that test the control system before installation, Emulate3D’s software enables customers to virtually test machine and system designs before incurring manufacturing and automation costs and committing to a final design. Emulate3D maintains a library of generic industrial equipment to help make a digital twin of your factory a reality.

Putting the virtual environment to the test

By creating a dynamic digital twin comprising of both the CAD model of the system or machine together with the control system, you have at your disposal a powerful means of putting a system through its paces in a virtual environment, where the cost of changes is minimal compared to those incurred at the commissioning phase.

3D simulation and emulation software provides an ideal platform for creating dynamic digital twins. With it, you can import the CAD from a wide range of standard formats, create kinematic behaviours to reflect the movements of the real system, and connect the model control items to the real control system via a tag browser. Then, you need to only create loads to drive the system and your twin is live and ready to be operated via the HMIs you will use in the real system.

This virtual environment can be verified and demonstrated, before committing any resources to their manufacture. When the real system is assembled onsite and connected to the control system, you can be confident that there will not be any logical operation or sequencing issues. They will have been identified and resolved earlier during the virtual commissioning phase of the project.

A system that has been put through the rigors of virtual testing and commissioning benefits everyone. Production workers gain a more thoroughly tested system that performs as expected. System integrators can predict commissioning times more accurately and plan accordingly, and all stakeholders win when projects come in on time and on budget.

Digital twins give OEMs a competitive edge

Gartner predicts that by 2022, or perhaps sooner, more than two-thirds of companies that have implemented IoT projects will have launched at least one digital twin in production. For machine builders, the nearly unlimited uses of a digital twin can provide a competitive edge. There are three key advantages that the technology can unleash in your business:

1. A Better Way to Design and Sell Machines

By using a digital twin to design, test and prove your machines digitally helps create higher calibre, lower-risk machines and get them to market faster. Using simulation software, you can apply physics to your machine’s CAD model to bring the model to life. Then, you can see how your machine runs and interacts with both people and other machines in a virtual environment.

2. Faster, More Consistent Commissioning

When a machine design and control system come together for the first time, there is a risk they may not be aligned. This can lead to last-minute design changes that are not only costly but can cause you to miss your customer’s start-up deadline. By using a digital twin to virtually commission your machine you can avoid these surprises.

3. Optimized Operations for Customer

When you pass a digital twin of your machine to a customer, you can help them optimize production and reduce downtime in several ways. Your customer can use the digital twin to train operators virtually, before your machine arrives. This can help workers build competency sooner and it can help them prepare for a wider range of incidents than real world training, because virtual training allows you to simulate faults and extreme conditions that may be difficult to recreate physically.

During production, a digital twin can simulate operations, which can help workers explore opportunities for improvement or try changes before making them. Finally, a digital twin can help maintenance teams reduce downtime in new ways. If there is a stoppage, technicians can see digital diagnostics overlaid on a physical machine in an augmented reality (AR) environment to more quickly troubleshoot the problem.

A digital twin can make you more competitive by improving how people work and moving projects into a dynamic digital environment.