IoT System diagram. (Image courtesy of PTC LiveWorx 2017.)
At the event, ENGINEERING.com met up with Rob Patterson, VP of strategic marketing at PTC and Eric Bantegnie, VP of the systems business unit at ANSYS, to get the low down on the heavily CAE influenced release.
ThingWorx Looks to an Interconnected Engineering Toolbox
IoT isn’t just about dashboards anymore. Engineers can gain insights from an ecosystem of interconnected tools. (Image courtesy of PTC LiveWorx 2017.)
“Why connect products to the internet of things if not to lifecycle manage it,” joked Jim Heppelmann, CEO of PTC. “We partner with ANSYS, Matlab and Simulink to make a more accurate model of the digital twin.”
During Heppelmann’s opening keynote, his team painted an interconnected digital and physical system linking various tools from computer-aided design and engineering (CAD and CAE), to the Internet of Things (IoT), model-based design (MBD) simulation, 3D printing and the digital twin. The digital canvas depicted on stage showed engineering teams collect data from products in the field and create and simulate a new iteration of the design, based on the scenario that created the initial response in the real world.
“Once you design a product, you don’t have good insights on how things operate in the real world,” said Bantegnie.
“With the digital twin, you can associate a twin for every product in operation which provides feedback to designers by understanding how things operate, their conditions, lifecycle and maintenance in the release world. This feedback helps engineers design a better generation of products.”
This means that engineers are linking simulations with real-time, real-world data to optimize redesigns. The cooling system redesign, shown to the LiveWorks audience, was 43 percent more efficient and 66 percent lighter than the initial model, thanks to the IoT, digital twin, simulation and an innovative 3D printed geometry.
Patterson notes how the platform can be used to analyse populations of machines to see overlapping failures or errors.
“Looking at the data sets and digital twin gives a better idea of the product quality after manufacturing and consumer use. This is really closing the engineering loop as you get the actual data that can then go into the model in the CAE system.”
To install the changes to the design, PTC imagines how maintenance crews can use Microsoft’s HoloLens technology to guide them through the process.
ThingWorx Manufacturing Apps Give Designers a Starting Point
The ThingWorx Manufacturing Apps are designed to give the right user the right amount of information they need based on their roles. (Image courtesy of PTC LiveWorx 2017.)
The aim of these tools is to help industrial IoT engineers optimize their company’s IoT deployments and operations quickly. These tools will include role-based intelligence to ensure that the right people get the information they need while protecting proprietary information that is on a need-to-know basis.
Patterson explains that after polling users, PTC found that it wasn’t enough to provide tools to make IoT apps and deployments. He added that engineers wanted starting points they can build off and customize for their own situation quickly. This is what the new manufacturing apps provide.
However, the apps are stand-alone and can be purchased and function on their own. However, engineers will need a full ThingWorx license to modify the app.
The ThingWorx Manufacturing Apps will include:
- ThingWorx Controls Advisor to troubleshoot and monitor IoT enables machines
- ThingWorx Production Advisor to screen the performance of production lines for real-time optimizations
- ThingWorx Asset Advisor to watch physical assets for efficiency and quality anomalies and alerts in real-time
HoloLens Augmented Reality Comes to ThingWorx Developers
Authoring an AR experience in ThingWorx Studio. (Image courtesy of PTC LiveWorx 2017.)
Specifically, it is now able to author and publish applications for Microsoft’s HoloLens using the ThingWorx Studio. This means that engineers can use 3D images and CAD models within their IoT AR programs.
Engineers building their AR user interfaces UI with ThingWorx Studio will note how similar it is to the ThingWorx Mashup Builder, used to create IoT UI apps and including drag-and-drop functionality. The only difference is the later works on a 2D plane while the former adds a dimension to the workflow.
In Heppelmann’s keynote he demonstrated how engineers designing AR interfaces with Studio can guide their maintenance team using CAD and AR technologies.
The ThingWorx Viewer recognized the product’s geometry using an tablet’s camera. A video is launched when the user overlaps a simplified pencil sketch on the tablet with the real-world image of the equipment. This video depicts the user step-by-step instructions to fix a problem with the system.
Heppelman argues that making a single app for each product will never scale and it’s his dream that ThingWorx Viewer will negate the need of creating individual apps. Instead, the viewer will interact with the IoT system using CAD information and AR technologies.
It isn’t hard to imagine how AR and VR could be useful to maintenance, sales and design teams, but virtual and augmented reality technologies need to first become more affordable.
Patterson suspects in the next year the price of AR and VR equipment will take a tumble while the technology further develops.
“It’s not an argument of paper versus digital – it’s digital versus digital,” argued Patterson. “It’s new versus very new. It’s against digital manuals and YouTube demonstrations.”
ThingWorx Partners with ANSYS for the Digital Twin
ANSYS simulation is simplified from a 3D to 1D model, added to a system simulation. This is then used with IoT data to create a digital twin. (Image courtesy of PTC LiveWorx 2017).
“Our contribution is to provide the PTC platform with all of ANSYS’s tools to help our customers make a complete replicate of the systems they are building,” said Batengnie. “This is traditionally done at the component level. In addition to that, we have a system level simulation that can operate real-time simulation in a real-world environment.”
Bantegnie explains that there are three main advantages to connecting simulations to IoT systems. They are to:
- Better monitor the system behaviour
- Create virtual sensors where physical sensors can’t go
- Preventative maintenance
Patterson agreed adding, “There is a huge value to model data and do things with it without having to break the product multiple times. Simulations can show a machine what a failure looks like. We can then tell the model to predict the scenarios where that happens. The ability to simulate break data is very important to machine learning. If you don’t have that break data from the real world of simulation then the analytics won’t tell you anything interesting.”
You might be thinking, “How can a slow 3D simulation connected to real-time data from the IoT work?” The answer is that ANSYS reduces the order of the simulation into a 1D model.
“ANSYS has the ability to make a reduced order model (ROM) from 3D models so they can assess the part within the assembly of a 1D system level model,” said Batengnie.
“If you have a fluid flow that takes an hour you can export this into Simplorer (ANSYS’ system simulation software) and then link that to ThingWorx. These ROM are compatible with all of our physics from mechanical, to electrical and to fluid.”
Batengnie continued, “If you want to make a digital twin and you don’t have all the physics you won’t have something accurate. The twin should be an exact replica of something and make decisions with something you trust.”
Those using ANSYS 18 to link into ThingWorx will have access to the Modelica modeling language and library to help simulate the system.
On top of the new ANSYS capabilities in ThingWorx, engineers will also have access to native anomaly detection. The tool is designed to democratize data analytics and detect when the system is performing in and out of normal parameters. This will make it easier for engineers to set up and discover alerts.
“We took the core machine learning kernel of ColdLight and cut it down to run on independent data streams” explained Patterson. “It looks at the data stream and comes up with a statistical model with self checking algorithms.”
Anomaly detection isn’t new to ThingWorx but now it is simplified and negates the need to integrate the tool using restful application program interfaces (APIs).
“When you say simulation, you think of the geometry,” Patterson continued, “but there is also statistical simulations to modify a product or environment to improve the chances of an outcome or reduce the chances of an outcome.”
This is where analytics and native anomaly detection comes into play.
ThingWorx Industrial Connectivity Ensures IoT Communication of Industrial Equipment
IoT systems need to source information form various sources. That is where Kepware and the ThingWorx Industrial Connectivity toolsets come into play. (Image courtesy of PTC LiveWorx 2017).
This is very important for industrial IoT (IIoT) implementation which can gain information from machines, programable logic controllers (PLCs) sensors, IoT gateways, cloud providers, enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems and manufacturing execution systems (MES).
Other interesting additions to ThingWorx 8 include:
- An extended ecosystem of partners and ThingWorx user community
- Additional educational programs
- ThingWorx integration with GE Predix and OSIsoft clouds
Is PTC on to something? Heppelmann thinks so. “Competitors have stopped saying PTC is distracted and are now saying, ‘Yeah we do that too.’”
What do you think? Comment below and join the conversation at #LiveWorx.
To learn more about ANSYS’ and PTC partnership, continue reading with us about how ANSYS is Bringing Simulation to ThingWorx’s IoT and Digital Twins.