Software Defined Manufacturing for the vehicle and supplier industry – research project SDM4FZI launched
Faster, more flexible, more efficient: This is at the top of the automotive industry’s wish list when it comes to developing its own production systems. To achieve this, today’s manufacturing needs a new technological foundation. This is precisely what the participants in the research project “Software-Defined Manufacturing for the Automotive and Supplier Industry (SDM4FZI)” have set out to achieve. Under the leadership of Bosch, the University of Stuttgart and the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), a total of 30 companies want to develop the foundations for software-defined manufacturing over the next three years. The goal: individual components up to entire factories can be flexibly planned, controlled and changed by software. This will pave the way for more variants and faster model and product changes in the automotive industry. Competitiveness is improved. The Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy is funding the research project with about 35 million euros.
The basic prerequisite is the abstraction of the existing hardware through digital twins, with the help of which the software can be automatically derived and distributed. For this, the existing production OT (Operational Technology) must be rethought in order to make the control and communication infrastructure SDM-capable. SDM creates the basis for innovative applications and business models that use digital twins as their core to optimise adaptable production systems.
The role of SimPlan AG in the SDM4FZI project is primarily to further develop value stream and logistics models into digital twins by integrating them into the SDM4FZI platform. Furthermore, the usability of these twins to support transformability is being demonstrated together with application partners such as Audi and Bosch.
SimPlan has many years of experience in the fields of material flow simulation, value stream simulation, factory planning, digital twinning and virtual commissioning (VIBN) with different software and development environments (e.g. PlantSimulation from Siemens, Automod from Applied Materials or Demo3D/Emulate3D from Rockwell) as well as with its own software solutions (SimAssist, SimVSM, jasima, PacSi). One focus of the development and marketing of our own software solutions is in the areas of value stream mapping and value stream simulation as well as the integration of simulators into IT platforms.