Potentials and Design of a Virtual Production System for Intelligent Battery Cell Manufacturing

The increasing worldwide demand for lithium-ion batteries is no longer an estimated forecast, but a fact. Observable trends, such as the increasing variety of battery cell formats and materials, present enormous challenges for the design of production processes. Many cause-effect relationships can be seen in the individual manufacturing processes, but are not yet properly or only partially understood. To meet these requirements and challenges and to ensure effective manufacturing, intelligent processes are needed in battery cell production. Methods of digitization, artificial intelligence and the use of digital twins offer a high potential to optimize the processes both in commissioning and in operation. These methods can be applied within a virtual production system for process optimization in battery cell manufacturing. In this paper, the potential of a virtual production system for battery cell manufacturing is discussed. Further, the design of a suitable infrastructure consisting of standardized interfaces, data models and process models is provided. The result is a system that offers the possibility to virtually quantify cause-effect relationships, to test optimization approaches along the entire process chain of battery cell production and to apply recommendations for action to the real production system. The process step of cell assembly is considered as an example. Here, the simulation model and the associated data model are specified.