Seamless simulation toolchain for virtual engineering and virtual commissioning of smart factories

Over the last years the number of products in automotive industries dramatically increased. Each product is manufactured in ever-growing variance. Additionally their complexity has grown tremendously. Plants for manufacturing engineering need to produce a large number of different models and thus need to be more flexible. Ramp up has to be performed frequently and has to be much more efficient.At the same time, smart factories are highly automated and have become much more complex themselves. Many variants of one product can be produced in one production line. Therefore setting up a production line has become a very involved task as the change of one process parameter influences many variants.Any occurring problem in the production line has serious consequences. But as the plant is much more intricate, once ramp up of a plant has started, the adaption of parameters is complicated and rapidly increases ramp up time. Thus the planning of production plants has to be performed as detailed as possible to reduce the need for adjustments during the phase of constructing the actual plant. To achieve such detailed planning the predictive power of virtual design has to be increased.