Dick Slansky is the first person to admit that he was a little “optimistic” when making his predictions about the adoption rate that digital manufacturing, and virtual commissioning in particular, would see over the past year. “It hasn’t grown as quickly as I thought it would,” concedes Slansky, senior PLM and Discrete Manufacturing analyst at ARC Advisory Group Inc., in Dedham, Mass.

{mosimage} A little over a year ago, he predicted the overall product lifecycle management (PLM) market would grow at a compounded annual growth rate of 14.5 percent and swell from $7.5 billion in 2006 to more than $14.6 billion by 2011. While he is still putting together his updated estimates to include 2007 and 2008 numbers, it is already clear that those numbers are too ambitious. And Slansky wasn’t alone in his optimism. Industry analyst firm CIMdata, which specializes in PLM, was even more bullish, predicting that the digital manufacturing tools market would more than double between 2006 and 2011, growing from an estimated $436 million to more than $1 billion.

“Several factors have constrained the growth, not the least of which are the economy and the relatively high cost of the solution,” says Slansky. Nevertheless, interest is there, and growth has been steady, despite the fact that a full deployment can often cost more than $100,000 per seat. More to the point, Slansky insists that rather than being an albatross dragging a company down, digital manufacturing and virtual commissioning can make a real impact on a company’s survival prospects in the current economic climate.

“The inclination is to hunker down, cut R&D, cut spending. Innovation is going to be the difference between surviving or not as we come out of the downturn. And engineering reform is still going to be a key difference maker.”

Traditionally, mechanical engineers and control engineers didn’t work together. The mechanical engineer would get the model of the finished product, design the manufacturing line to produce it and then call in the control engineer to create the code that would run the line. As the old military cliché goes, no plan survives contact with the enemy—or in this case, the production floor—and finding the design did not work as advertised was commonplace. Dozens of different factors such as collisions between robots, bad ergonomics or having the wrong machines altogether, could rise up to snafu the plan, which then had to be reworked or otherwise fixed. Since this was done in the real world, it inevitably meant metal had been bent, which had to be unbent, which in turn is time consuming and expensive. Digital manufacturing and virtual commissioning promised to do away with all that, and, according to Slansky and a host of others, it’s starting to keep that promise.

Slansky defines digital manufacturing as the integration of digital models of product designs with manufacturing processes. The manufacturing engineer uses powerful 3D simulation tools to create a virtual model of all the production processes. Once complete, the virtual environment can be used to validate, synchronize and optimize the production process—to make sure it works as advertised.

Virtual commissioning is that element of digital manufacturing whereby all elements of a production line are computer-simulated prior to physical set-up. Using detailed mechanical CAD models that include the conveyor systems, robotic work cells, packaging equipment and the control systems, programmable logic controllers (PLCs), motors, sensors and drives, the entire production line, or even the entire factory, can be modeled and run to see if it will work in real life the way it’s supposed to.

“They can then use advanced simulation tools to validate that all of these components are synchronized, controlled, and will function in harmony to operate as intended and physically produce the product,” wrote Slansky in his January 2009 report: “The Real Story on Virtual Commissioning: Is the Technology Ready to Speed New Product Introduction?”

Additionally, “Engineers can use similar tools to design and program the control logic and pre-validate the connections, logic, and dynamics of the planned physical installation.  Virtual commissioning eliminates many of the time- and resource-consuming tasks that engineers must otherwise perform on real physical equipment prior to its use.”

The promised benefits can be eye opening. According to CIMdata, organizations using digital manufacturing can expect to see lead time to market reduced by an average of 30 percent, the number of design changes reduced by 65 percent and time spent in the manufacturing planning process reduced by 40 percent. On the other side of the equation, production throughput can ...