What is Virtual Commissioning?

What is Virtual Commissioning? How is it different from Manufacturing Simulation? What does it have to do with Industry 4.0? Carlos Ortega, Senior Simulation Analyst at Engineering Industries eXcellence, breaks it down for you. If you want to learn more, contact us at info@indx.com.

Full Video Transcript

My name is Carlos Ortega. I'm a Senior Analyst at Engineering, and my specialization is within Simulation.

Virtual Commissioning, or what is behind Virtual Commissioning, is the idea of having a virtual environment, which is called a “Digital Twin,” and be able to interact with it with devices from the physical world. Let’s say you have, for example, a robot, a clamp system or a fixture within a manufacturing cell that you want to test in a virtual environment. [Leveraging Virtual Commissioning] You're able to send a signal from the real world into the virtual world with these devices.

The biggest benefit of Virtual Commissioning is savings. You’re able to test ahead of time on an investment, one that could be in the hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars for equipment, because a single robot could run you about 50,000 to 70,000 dollars. So, if you have five robots, equipment, clamping systems, fixtures, different products, and you have all this coming together into a manufacturing cell, you're talking a huge investment. You don't want to go into a process without knowing if this process will be able to perform up to the levels you are expecting from it.

Virtual Commissioning is something that is already happening. The big companies, mostly automotive OEMs, already have this in place and are making most of this testing using Virtual Commissioning for their manufacturing cells. This is something Engineering is able to do already. This is technology that is already in place for other manufacturers, it's not exclusive for the big manufacturers. In fact, we will have a lab set up for Virtual Commissioning and showcase this coming soon; this is something we're really excited to have in the near future at Engineering. But this is technology that's already in place, and it's ready to be deployed for everybody.

What is really interesting about Engineering is that we have the knowledge on all the different parts that compose Virtual Commissioning: we have the simulation experts like me, we have MES experts, we have PLC experts, and we have integration capabilities. We have everything in place to take on any kind of challenge. This is not something many companies across the world could say.