Nvidia, Siemens tout 'industrial metaverse' to predict the future
- Reference: 1656574510
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2022/06/30/nvidia_siemens_omniverse/
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During a press conference this week, Siemens CEO Roland Busch painted a picture of a future in which manufacturers are besieged with productivity, labor, and supply chain disruptions.
"The answer to all of these challenges is technology and digitalization," he said. "The point is, we have to make the digital twin as realistic as possible and bring it as close as possible to the real world."
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Making digital representations of complex physical systems more accessible to customers of all sizes was the subject of Siemens and Nvidia's latest partnership: what Busch calls the "industrial metaverse."
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"The industrial metaverse is an immersive, real-time digital twin. It's photorealistic but at the same time physics-based. This means the twin is not only showing how it looks like in real time, but also how it behaves in the real world," Busch enthused. "It's not about animation – it's about simulation."
Predicting the future?
"When we're designing a product, plan, or process, we want to predict whether it's going to be effective or not," Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang opined. "The ability to predict the future is possible in many areas of design."
By running a digital twin concurrently alongside a physical manufacturing plant, customers can establish a baseline that helps them to predict future performance.
"You have to believe that what happens in the physical world will be predicted in the virtual world, and what happens in the virtual world will absolutely happen in the physical world," Huang said. "As a result, this virtual model can be used for optimizations, design changes, future iterations, predictive maintenance … because you believe in it."
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Within ten years, Huang believes the technology will enable manufacturers to design, simulate, and operate new plants or manufacturing facilities before they ever break ground.
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The language barrier
As you might expect, creating a digital twin requires a lot of data from connected devices all communicating in a common language. That's where Siemens "Xcelerator", announced this week, comes in. The as-a-service offering is billed as an open, curated marketplace for operational technology software and hardware built around a common set of APIs.
"In order to create a digital twin, you have to fuse mechanical materials, electronics, computer software, planning, and ERP systems in a virtual plant," Huang explained, adding that to do this, Nvidia and Siemens are standardizing on the Pixar-developed universal scene description (USD).
All of this data can then be fed into Nvidia's Omniverse digital twinning platform to create photorealistic simulations of complex systems ranging from factory floors to the inner workings of an integrated circuit.
In addition to building out a compatible software and hardware ecosystem, Siemens Xcelerator also aims to lower the barrier to adoption.
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"The basic idea of Siemens Xcelerator is to make it accessible for large companies, for small companies," to take advantage of things like digital twins, Busch explained. "This is the reason why we're pushing so hard for as-a-service, not just for software, but hardware-as-a-service."
While Busch dodged questions relating to how many customers will be able to afford the technology, he insisted it was in his company's best interest to make it accessible to even the smallest of manufacturers. He also suggested we might see some freemium offerings in the future as Siemens looks to scale up the platform.
What's more, customers that have already deployed the firm's NX or Tecnomatix platforms could get a taste of the so-called "industrial metaverse" sooner rather than later.
"If you're using any of those tools, you've already started down the journey of going into the industrial metaverse," Huang said. ®
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Yogi Berra -
“It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future.”
"The answer to all of these challenges is technology and digitalization,"
No, the answer to these problems is work.
Your digitized thingamajig will be useless for getting a product onto a truck and shipped.
Re: "The answer to all of these challenges is technology and digitalization,"
Useless? No more useless than drafting, 3D modelling, simulation and then Product Lifecycle Management have been, and they've been very useful - hence their widespread adoption in industry.
If you can benefit from creating digital models and prototypes of a product before spending millions on tooling - you can benefit from creating digital models for entire factories and supply chains.
Yes, this Siemens spokesman was using buzzwords, but the vision is obvious enough - especially if you know that existing PLM software is not merely an evolution of draughting, and not just a simulation environment, but is a method of bringing together all product data (from the 3D model, component supplier agreements, simulation of parts, results of real-world testing and the difference, customer issues from the previous version...) and putting it to use. Cheaply simulate before expensively implementing
Obvious and self evident.
If you add to this more data collection, cheaper processing power and better simulations of physical systems, the more scenarios you can test ahead of time. The cost of simulation goes down. The scope of complex scenarios that can be simulated goes up. You might virtually stress-test your supply chain for example "What happens if factory X is flooded?"*
Now, PLM software carries the usual warning 'digital simulation is not intended to replace physical testing, merely to reduce the search space'. Fine, an engineer can make physical prototypes for real testing. A CEO typically can't do that for business strategies. Simulation, prediction, analysis is all they've got.
* Yeah, to fully analyse supply chains you'd need to interact with other companies' digital models and even then chaos would limit the scopes of predictions - just as with weather forecasting. However, the models would serve as a reminder that macro problems can arise from seemingly micro causes.
And using VR you can have real people virtually populate your virtual factory, for insights into movement, ergonomics, shift patterns. Why stop there?
Have people role-play through social policies before enacting them. I mean, any decision maker who can materially effect millions of lives should be duty bound to do everything they can to make the best decision, no?
technology will enable manufacturers to design, simulate, and operate new plants
Yeah, exactly like we did using computers on my engineering degree 30 years ago. OK, it was fairly limited compared to what's available now, but big manufacturers all use this stuff, day in, day out. Sounds like a repackaging and hyping effort, coming from an established engineering firm like Siemens. And they should know that "photorealistic" is less important than "concentrates on the important stuff", but I guess that's the weakness of the ideas that emerge when engineering firms combine with graphics cards manufacturers.
Modelling of this kind already takes place, has for decades
It's just a spin with fancy toys which will be based of existing methodology and likely be no more accurate.