Automotive - Body in White

If you want to survive in the global, fast-moving automotive market, you have to offer a large number of variants - individual vehicle types as well as different equipment. The sharp increase in the number of variants poses a challenge to the automotive industry and its supply chain, which affects not only development and purchasing, but also production in particular. In order to plan efficiently and error-free, the diversity of variants must be considered throughout the production planning process. The integration into PDM systems is a prerequisite for the modeling and modification of the joining sequence as well as the digital safeguarding of the variants in production plants.

The implementation of new production lines, the retrofitting of a plant or even the manufacture of new products on existing robot cells is becoming increasingly complex. One of the challenges is to better synchronize and parallelize the mechanical design and the development of the system control in order to shorten the project duration. PLC validation based on a digital plant model and the virtual commissioning of robot cells are the decisive steps to shift a large part of the real commissioning to digital simulation. A digital plant twin behaves like a digital copy of the real cell - including the relevant signals and behavior models. This digital plant twin allows all functional processes to be defined, tested and secured in a virtual environment for a faster and error-free achievement of production capacity.