Dassault Systèmes has sponsored this post.

Industry 4.0 has been a buzzword for nearly a decade. While savvy organizations made early investments in adding sensors and bringing more software into their facilities, many have only recently started to onboard IIoT (Industrial Internet of Things) and other tools of the next industrial wave.

Now, as the world of Industry 4.0 is gaining recognition as a necessary step for efficient manufacturing, factory floors are monitoring machines and finding nuanced ways to make their production more efficient. However, that is only half of the picture.

The Future Is Here with Virtual Twins

Virtual twins (also known as digital twins) and predictive technologies complete the concept of the next industrial revolution. Many manufacturers have started to implement these digital twins of their machines and factory floors because those virtual twins act and react just like their physical counterparts. This enables users to not only do predictive maintenance, but also test and measure updates and tweaks.

Doing efficiency updates and tweaks in the virtual world reduces the risk when implementing such updates on the factory floor. New machinery, new software or even new processes can disrupt your manufacturing process, even if it will eventually make it more efficient. A virtual twin lessens that burden by helping to remove the unknowns.

Virtual twins are quickly becoming indispensable for factories that require efficiency—in other words, all factories. Even small- and mid-sized companies are finding value in leveraging virtual twins.

Spencer Cramer, CEO of ei3, an industrial Internet intelligence company that focuses on Industry 4.0, said, “One powerful aspect of Industry 4.0 technology is its ability to aggregate data from many anonymous sources and run AI analytics to create process knowledge that is used to make accurate digital twins. These digital twins level the business playing field by giving smaller and mid-sized companies access to levels of knowledge that used to be only available to the largest companies in their field.”

When asked about the importance of virtual twins as Industry 4.0 grows and becomes more incorporated into every stage of a facility’s lifecycle, Cramer said, “The value of a digital twin can’t be overstated. Over and over again, we have seen ei3’s manufacturing customers benefit by using digital twins to plan new equipment purchases both for commissioning new lines as well as for integrating equipment into brownfield sites to improve operations.”

But what if you have yet to build your factory line? Or what if you’re preparing to modify it or expand it?

What Is Virtual Commissioning?

A factory is an ecosystem where every piece affects every other piece. This is what makes things so challenging, and arguably why manufacturers are so risk averse. Tiny mishaps can equate to lots of expensive fixes.

According to Dassault Systèmes, “Virtual commissioning improves on traditional shop floor commissioning by performing tests in a partial or full virtual environment. This speeds up the process and significantly reduces the potential for expensive delays due to errors and rework.”

Traditionally, a factory line started on 2D CAD, was re-created with 3D design tools and eventually commissioned to the shop floor. This process has long been time-consuming; but more importantly, it is a process prone to transpositional and other human errors. We all know how expensive silly mistakes can be in design, but that risk is exponentially higher when building out a factory floor.

Dassault Systèmes sees a virtual twin not so much as a replica, but rather as a virtual master of the physical line. Through Dassault Systèmes’ virtual commissioning applications, businesses are finding ways to save money and become more efficient before the factory or line is even built, and then leveraging the virtual master when updating, adding additions or recommissioning lines.

According to Dassault, “one of the key features is our 3DEXPERIENCE twin—a virtual replica that is used to simulate factory lines so as to speed up development, reduce risk and costs and to provide an immersive 3D model that offers more effective stakeholder engagement.“

This virtual commissioning essentially creates a virtual twin before the physical line is created, which allows users to build, test and tweak a design before ever installing the machines. Instead of losing information by replicating a factory line in 2D—as was common practice in the past—businesses have a digital master that allows them to get ever closer to having zero defects or errors when the physical commission is installed.

A New Form of Simulation

We have all seen how valuable simulation can be in the CAD world. Virtual commissioning is essentially a new form of simulation that is applied to a line or even the whole factory floor. It allows users to create a virtual twin of the line before the line exists in the physical world.

Many might think that we’ve been doing this for years; it is how 2D CAD and 3D modeling tools have often been used. But virtual commissioning provides a true digital replica of your setup, so you can test, measure and experiment before spending real time and capital creating the real-life line.

This means that everything that might touch the physical line once installed will affect the digital twin in these planning stages. Your PLC can work the same with the virtual commission as it would with the physical line, allowing you to discover opportunities for efficiency and observe how they will affect your facility before ever having a physical line.

This has led to the broader adoption of just-in-sequence manufacturing, which requires greater precision and agility within the factory. The benefit, much like just-in-time manufacturing, is that just-in-sequence allows the production line to handle delivery and use of components very quickly. This is thanks to close coordination between suppliers and OEMs, which is why feedback from the manufacturing line is so important. Just-in-sequence improves the return on assets without loss in flexibility, quality or overall efficiency.

The virtual environment allows you to test new product types and reorganize existing lines, while also reducing installation and debugging time, creating more flexibility and streamlining legacy challenges. In fact, according to Dassault Systèmes, virtual commissioning could save months versus traditional methods with up to a 75 percent reduction in control debugging time. Factory downtime could also be reduced by avoiding bad design or unnecessary work, which saves money and could reduce total installation time by 15–25 percent.

Dassault Systèmes provides virtual commissioning via their 3DEXPERIENCE platform. This means designers can work within the same tools they are familiar with, which creates a more secure environment for communication, collaboration and continuity. As a cloud-based platform, the system enables all parties to access the latest designs while protecting the intellectual property of project contributors.

Using virtual commissioning technology isn’t reserved for just the big, blue-chip organizations. Even small- and mid-sized businesses can see benefits from creating a virtual twin of even a single line because it can allow for minimal downtime if there is a need to reconfigure machinery. To put it another way, it levels the playing field for growth—small companies can grow when business allows, with less risk of a loss in production.

Virtual Commissioning in the Wild

There are already a number of businesses leveraging this cloud-based platform to design, test and commission lines. Robot at Work, a specialist in production lines with robots, benefitted from a unified solution to increase the efficiency of production start-up.

Robot at Work found the 3DEXPERIENCE platform and its DELMIA application provided all they needed to visualize robots in full operation in their cells. In one plant with 12 robot cells, the use of Dassault’s 3DEXPERIENCE twin for modeling and virtual simulation of robotic movement allowed Robot at Work to design a production line in 75 percent of the space initially estimated.

Use of virtual twins of production lines sets Robot at Work apart from its competition and helps the company gets new business.

“It’s revolutionized how we handle new projects,” says Lorenzo Codini, administrator of Robots at Work, in a Dassault Systèmes case study.

There has been a lot of talk over the past decade about Industry 4.0 and the implementation of everything from IIoT to virtual factories, but virtual commissioning may be the beginning of what the next industrial revolution really has to offer. With virtual twins and the ability to test and measure both individual machine designs and how those machines work together, while also tying all of that to a real-world PLC for testing and experimentation, means that the digital factory is finally here—and it’s only going to become more prevalent as small- and mid-sized businesses take on the opportunity to provide unique assets to the larger manufacturing world.