EASY VIRTUAL COMMISSIONING WITH PROCESS SIMULATE VC LITE

EASY VIRTUAL COMMISSIONING WITH PROCESS SIMULATE VC LITE

Virtual commissioning helps tackle current manufacturing automation challenges

System integrators and automation engineers today face numerous challenges, including constantly changing customer demands, shorter product lifecycles, and accelerated time-to-market. New technologies such as autonomous mobile robots, advanced robots powered by machine learning, and vision-based systems are increasingly important in realizing flexible manufacturing systems capable of handling these challenges.

Navigating these challenges effectively—especially while COVID-19 continues to disrupt global markets—is critical for any system integrator.

Ongoing trends and challenges in manufacturing automation are driving the need for changes in production implementation

A particularly critical and sensitive phase must always occur before production begins. This is when mechanical, electrical, and control engineering distributions first come together to form the production environment (machines or systems). With digital twins, such integration can also be achieved virtually.

What is Virtual Commissioning?

Virtual Commissioning is the design and testing of a virtual model of a production facility or machinery. This involves using 3D simulations to create a digital twin of the plant, which is then connected to either physical PLC hardware (hardware-in-the-loop) or virtual PLC software (software-in-the-loop), such as PLCSIM Advanced, allowing virtually all aspects of the production process to be tested before implementation or changes.

For example, robots can be virtually commissioned, tested, and optimized before transferring programs to the physical facility, and new technologies can be integrated and validated.

Virtual commissioning with Process Simulate VC Lite and TIA Portal

Benefits of Virtual Commissioning

• A shared virtual space for mechanical, electrical, control, and systems engineers to collaborate and co-develop simultaneously, instead of sequentially during the early phases of the production system lifecycle.
• An environment to conduct early mechanical-driven control testing, and early control logic testing by observing machine or system reactions to PLC outputs and PLC responses to machine/system inputs.
• Comprehensive simulation of the entire production system with all components, allowing upgrades or reconfiguration with minimal downtime.
• Shifts commissioning activities away from the shop floor, reducing on-site personnel requirements during final commissioning from weeks to days, significantly cutting costs.
• Realistic validation of a machine or system to identify and resolve errors and optimize programs, visualizing issues such as incorrect material flow or inaccurate event sequences.

Virtual commissioning simulates execution changes, saving significant costs before production starts

Process Simulate VC Lite

Is virtual commissioning only for large enterprises? Definitely not! With Process Simulate VC Lite, Siemens brings virtual commissioning and robot capabilities to small and medium-sized enterprises across industries such as electronics, industrial machinery, automated manufacturing system integrators, consumer goods, and more.

VC Lite provides users with full functionality to develop a digital twin, including:

• CAD import, kinematics, and physics-based modeling
• Layout design and management tools
• Trajectory planning and offline programming applications for all major robot brands
• AGV applications for motion planning and autonomous vehicle validation
• Virtual camera simulation for system observation validation and optimization
• Advanced connectivity with additional tools for virtual commissioning: robot vendor RCS modules and virtual robot controllers, hardware- and software-based automation systems, AGV fleet management systems, vision systems, and open connections for user-defined applications.

Source: Siemens

SDE TECHNOLOGY CO., LTD (SDE TECH) was established in 2014. By 2018, we became a Smart Expert Partner – a leading partner of Siemens Digital Industries Software in Southeast Asia – Pacific region for Siemens NX (Unigraphics NX), Simcenter, Solid Edge, Tecnomatix, and Teamcenter solutions.

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