Let’s learn how digital twins are helping global companies transform the automotive industry sustainably, and explore the uses and benefits of Beamo, a digital twin service for building and managing automotive plants.
A digital twin is a digital replica of a physical product, facility, or process in a virtual, three-dimensional space, a technology that allows you to monitor and optimize the behavior of a real-world system in real time. Digital twins are revolutionizing the industrial workplace by enabling capabilities such as predictive analytics, real-time monitoring, integration with autonomous systems, and more recently, sustainable energy management. In this article, we'll explore how a global automotive company is using digital twins to build innovative solutions for a sustainable future.
Siemens announced that it has teamed up with Mercedes-Benz to co-develop a digital energy twin to facilitate the future of sustainable factory planning in the automotive industry. The Siemens and Mercedes-Benz digital energy twin is designed to realize the automaker's goal of running 100% of its production sites worldwide on renewable energy by 2039. Whether building a new factory or redesigning or expanding an existing one, improving the energy planning process at an early stage is key to significantly reducing planning time.
In this collaboration between Siemens and Mercedes-Benz, a digital energy twin will be tested at ‘Factory 56’, the Mercedes-Benz factory in Sindelfingen, Germany. The digital energy twin connects various data based on behavioral models of buildings, technical equipment, and energy production, and provides recommendations for operational optimization, including energy efficiency and associated cost savings and emissions reduction. Siemens will use its know-how in the field of decarbonization and energy twins to support training, development, and maintenance to enable the widespread implementation of digital energy twins across Mercedes-Benz’s global production network. Through this collaboration, both companies look forward to successfully visualizing and analyzing energy-efficient building processes using digital energy twins, and ultimately optimizing them in a sustainable way.
In November, Hyundai Motor Group announced the completion of the Hyundai Motor Group Singapore Global Innovation Center(HMGICS), a manufacturing system based on advanced technologies such as artificial intelligence, information and communication technology(ICT), and robotics. By building a digital twin-based meta-factory in a virtual, three-dimensional space, Hyundai Motor Group has improved efficiency across processes, calculating optimized utilization rates without piloting actual processes, and easily managing manufacturing and logistics processes without physical visits. Through the digital twin, workers give instructions in a virtual space, and robots deployed in each process calculate the optimal timing and route.
Hyundai Motor Group plans to phase in the platform developed and demonstrated by HMGICS to its new global EV plants, including Hyundai Motor Group Metaplant American in Georgia, USA, and the dedicated EV plat in Ulsan, South Korea, scheduled for completion in 2025, to maximize production efficiency.
Beamo is a digital twin service that stitches together photos taken with a 360-degree camera to create a digital representation of your site in virtual space. Simply mount your 360 camera and smartphone on a tripod and walk around the site to automatically capture. Upload the captured data and you’ll have a digital twin of your site in just a few minutes.
Applying these digital twin services to the construction phase of an automobile plant will allow you to manage the construction site more efficiently. With Beamo, you can capture the construction site at regular intervals to remotely monitor the site as it changes from day to day. With the ability to compare surveys in up to four quarters, you can visualize and analyze project progress over time, and generate timeline reports to share progress by date with project stakeholders. The use of digital twins allows you to monitor construction site that are far away from your headquarters without having to physically visit them, allowing you to check on things like construction progress and safety management, which in turn reduces construction time and costs.
Beamo can also be used for factory monitoring and management by integrating data from various IoT sensors. IoT sensors installed in the factory can collect real-time data on various parameters such as temperature, humidity, air quality, energy consumption, equipment performance, and more, which can be fed into a digital twin to provide a comprehensive view of the facility's condition. Managers can remotely monitor the inside of a factory to quickly identify problems and optimize operations by being able to control specific systems or equipment without having to be on site.
Digital twins are being utilized as a powerful tool for innovation in many industries, from manufacturing to the energy sector. It enables companies to increase productivity, reduce maintenance costs, and transform their systems into more environmentally friendly operations, which is a huge benefit for sustainable energy management and global competitiveness. In conclusion, digital twins are positioned as one of the key technologies of the industrial revolution, and are expected to be further developed through collaborations between companies, such as the Siemens-Mercedes Benz case.
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