Plant Simulation
Encyclopedia
Plant Simulation is a computer application developed by Siemens PLM Software
for modeling, simulating
, analyzing
, visualizing
and optimizing
production systems and processes, the flow of materials and logistic operations. Using Tecnomatix Plant Simulation, users can optimize material flow, resource utilization and logistics for all levels of plant planning from global production facilities, through local plants, to specific lines. Within the Plant Design und Optimization Solution the software portfolio, to which Plant Simulation belongs, is — together with the products of the Digital Factory and of Digital Manufacturing — part of the Product Lifecycle Management
Software (PLM). The application
allows comparing complex production
alternatives, including the immanent process logic, by means of computer simulations. Plant Simulation is used by individual production planners as well as by multi-national enterprises, primarily to strategically plan layout, control logic and dimensions of large, complex production investments. It is one of the major products that dominate that market space.
simulation Software (Discrete Event Simulation; DES Software
). Using simulation, complex and dynamic enterprise workflows are evaluated to arrive at mathematically safeguarded entrepreneurial decisions. The Computer model allows the user to execute experiments and to run through 'what if scenarios' without either having to experiment with the real production environment or, when applied within the planning phase, long before the real system exists. In general the Material flow analysis
is used when discrete production processes are running. These processes are characterized by non-steady material flows, which means that the part is either there or not there, the shift takes place or does not take place, the machine works without errors or reports a failure. These processes resist simple mathematical descriptions and derivations due to numerous dependencies. Before powerful computers were available, most problems of material flow simulation have been solved by means of queuing theory and operations research
methods. In most cases the solutions resulting from these calculations were hard to understand and were marked by a large number of boundary conditions and restrictions which were hard to abide by in reality
.
, German
, Japanese
and Chinese
. The user can create individual Dialog box
es using double-byte characters
and offering individual parameterizations. The user can switch between the available languages.
environment to non-simulation experts. The 3D engine is based on the industry standard JT format
. CAD applications such as NX
, Solid Edge
can export models in this format. The 3D data files can be imported in the JT format
'.jt' by using Drag-and-drop
.
Lately material flow simulation gains growing importance through the increasing use for considering the sustainability of industrial production processes. Here the characteristics of sustainable manufacturing are simulated and analyzed beforehand and then integrated into the investment decision process.
Plant Simulation is also used for research and development purposes at a great number of universities and universities of applied science.
Siemens PLM Software
Siemens PLM Software is a computer software company specializing in 3D & 2D Product Lifecycle Management software. The company is a business unit of Siemens Industry Automation division, and is headquartered in Plano, Texas....
for modeling, simulating
Simulation
Simulation is the imitation of some real thing available, state of affairs, or process. The act of simulating something generally entails representing certain key characteristics or behaviours of a selected physical or abstract system....
, analyzing
Analysis
Analysis is the process of breaking a complex topic or substance into smaller parts to gain a better understanding of it. The technique has been applied in the study of mathematics and logic since before Aristotle , though analysis as a formal concept is a relatively recent development.The word is...
, visualizing
Information visualization
Information visualization is the interdisciplinary study of "the visual representation of large-scale collections of non-numerical information, such as files and lines of code in software systems, library and bibliographic databases, networks of relations on the internet, and so forth".- Overview...
and optimizing
Process optimization
Process optimization is the discipline of adjusting a process so as to optimize some specified set of parameters without violating some constraint. The most common goals are minimizing cost, maximizing throughput, and/or efficiency...
production systems and processes, the flow of materials and logistic operations. Using Tecnomatix Plant Simulation, users can optimize material flow, resource utilization and logistics for all levels of plant planning from global production facilities, through local plants, to specific lines. Within the Plant Design und Optimization Solution the software portfolio, to which Plant Simulation belongs, is — together with the products of the Digital Factory and of Digital Manufacturing — part of the Product Lifecycle Management
Product lifecycle management
In industry, product lifecycle management is the process of managing the entire lifecycle of a product from its conception, through design and manufacture, to service and disposal...
Software (PLM). The application
Application software
Application software, also known as an application or an "app", is computer software designed to help the user to perform specific tasks. Examples include enterprise software, accounting software, office suites, graphics software and media players. Many application programs deal principally with...
allows comparing complex production
Manufacturing
Manufacturing is the use of machines, tools and labor to produce goods for use or sale. The term may refer to a range of human activity, from handicraft to high tech, but is most commonly applied to industrial production, in which raw materials are transformed into finished goods on a large scale...
alternatives, including the immanent process logic, by means of computer simulations. Plant Simulation is used by individual production planners as well as by multi-national enterprises, primarily to strategically plan layout, control logic and dimensions of large, complex production investments. It is one of the major products that dominate that market space.
Product description
Plant Simulation is a Material flowMaterial flow
Material flow is the description of the transportation of raw materials, pre-fabricates, parts, components, integrated objects and finally products as a flow of entities. The term applies mainly to advanced modeling of Supply chain management...
simulation Software (Discrete Event Simulation; DES Software
Discrete Event Simulation
In discrete-event simulation, the operation of a system is represented as a chronological sequence of events. Each event occurs at an instant in time and marks a change of state in the system...
). Using simulation, complex and dynamic enterprise workflows are evaluated to arrive at mathematically safeguarded entrepreneurial decisions. The Computer model allows the user to execute experiments and to run through 'what if scenarios' without either having to experiment with the real production environment or, when applied within the planning phase, long before the real system exists. In general the Material flow analysis
Material flow analysis
Material flow analysis is an analytical method of quantifying flows and stocks of materials or substances in a well-defined system. MFA is an important tool to assess the physical consequences of human activities and needs in the field of Industrial Ecology, where it is used on different spatial...
is used when discrete production processes are running. These processes are characterized by non-steady material flows, which means that the part is either there or not there, the shift takes place or does not take place, the machine works without errors or reports a failure. These processes resist simple mathematical descriptions and derivations due to numerous dependencies. Before powerful computers were available, most problems of material flow simulation have been solved by means of queuing theory and operations research
Operations research
Operations research is an interdisciplinary mathematical science that focuses on the effective use of technology by organizations...
methods. In most cases the solutions resulting from these calculations were hard to understand and were marked by a large number of boundary conditions and restrictions which were hard to abide by in reality
Reality
In philosophy, reality is the state of things as they actually exist, rather than as they may appear or might be imagined. In a wider definition, reality includes everything that is and has been, whether or not it is observable or comprehensible...
.
Languages
Plant Simulation is available in EnglishEnglish language
English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...
, German
German language
German is a West Germanic language, related to and classified alongside English and Dutch. With an estimated 90 – 98 million native speakers, German is one of the world's major languages and is the most widely-spoken first language in the European Union....
, Japanese
Japanese language
is a language spoken by over 130 million people in Japan and in Japanese emigrant communities. It is a member of the Japonic language family, which has a number of proposed relationships with other languages, none of which has gained wide acceptance among historical linguists .Japanese is an...
and Chinese
Chinese language
The Chinese language is a language or language family consisting of varieties which are mutually intelligible to varying degrees. Originally the indigenous languages spoken by the Han Chinese in China, it forms one of the branches of Sino-Tibetan family of languages...
. The user can create individual Dialog box
Dialog box
In a graphical user interface of computers, a dialog box is a type of window used to enable reciprocal communication or "dialog" between a computer and its user. It may communicate information to the user, prompt the user for a response, or both...
es using double-byte characters
DBCS
A double-byte character set is a character set that represents each character with 2 bytes. The DBCS supports national languages that contain a large number of unique characters or symbols...
and offering individual parameterizations. The user can switch between the available languages.
Special features
- Object-oriented programmingObject-oriented programmingObject-oriented programming is a programming paradigm using "objects" – data structures consisting of data fields and methods together with their interactions – to design applications and computer programs. Programming techniques may include features such as data abstraction,...
with- InheritanceInheritance (object-oriented programming)In object-oriented programming , inheritance is a way to reuse code of existing objects, establish a subtype from an existing object, or both, depending upon programming language support...
: Users create libraries with their own objects, which can be re-used. As opposed to a copy, any change to an object class within the library is propagated to any of the derived objects (children). - PolymorphismPolymorphism in object-oriented programmingSubtype polymorphism, almost universally called just polymorphism in the context of object-oriented programming, is the ability to create a variable, a function, or an object that has more than one form. The word derives from the Greek "πολυμορφισμός" meaning "having multiple forms"...
: Classes can be derived and derived methods can be redefined. This enables users to build complex models faster, easier and with a clearer structure. - HierarchyHierarchyA hierarchy is an arrangement of items in which the items are represented as being "above," "below," or "at the same level as" one another...
: Complex structures can be created very clearly on several (logic) layers. This facilitates a Top-down and bottom-up designTop-down and bottom-up designTop–down and bottom–up are strategies of information processing and knowledge ordering, mostly involving software, but also other humanistic and scientific theories . In practice, they can be seen as a style of thinking and teaching...
approach.
- Inheritance
- Openness for importing data from other systems, such as AccessMicrosoft AccessMicrosoft Office Access, previously known as Microsoft Access, is a relational database management system from Microsoft that combines the relational Microsoft Jet Database Engine with a graphical user interface and software-development tools. It is a member of the Microsoft Office suite of...
or OracleOracle DatabaseThe Oracle Database is an object-relational database management system produced and marketed by Oracle Corporation....
data bases, ExcelMicrosoft ExcelMicrosoft Excel is a proprietary commercial spreadsheet application written and distributed by Microsoft for Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X. It features calculation, graphing tools, pivot tables, and a macro programming language called Visual Basic for Applications...
worksheets or from SAPSAP ERPThe SAP ERP application is an integrated enterprise resource planning software manufactured by SAP AG that targets business software requirements of midsize and large organizations in all industries and sectors...
. - Integration: Plant Simulation is part of the Digital factory and supports
- importing data from PLMProduct lifecycle managementIn industry, product lifecycle management is the process of managing the entire lifecycle of a product from its conception, through design and manufacture, to service and disposal...
systems or be used during - Virtual Commissioning
- taking over layout data from AutocadAutoCADAutoCAD is a software application for computer-aided design and drafting in both 2D and 3D. It is developed and sold by Autodesk, Inc. First released in December 1982, AutoCAD was one of the first CAD programs to run on personal computers, notably the IBM PC...
, MicrostationMicrostationMicroStation is a CAD software product for 2- and 3-dimensional design and drafting, developed and sold by Bentley Systems. The latest versions of the software are released solely for Microsoft Windows operating systems, but historically MicroStation was available for Macintosh platforms and a...
, FactoryCAD, etc. directly into the simulation.
- importing data from PLM
- Provides comprehensible analysis tools for detecting bottlenecks (Bottleneck Analyzer), for tracking the flow of materials (Sankey diagramSankey diagramSankey diagrams are a specific type of flow diagram, in which the width of the arrows is shown proportionally to the flow quantity. They are typically used to visualize energy or material or cost transfers between processes.-Application:...
s) or for detecting over-dimensioned resources (Chart Wizard). - Provides integrated optimization tools:
- The Experiment Manager automatically creates scenarios or evaluates dependencies between two input parameters.
- Genetic algorithmGenetic algorithmA genetic algorithm is a search heuristic that mimics the process of natural evolution. This heuristic is routinely used to generate useful solutions to optimization and search problems...
s search large solution spaces. - Neural networkNeural networkThe term neural network was traditionally used to refer to a network or circuit of biological neurons. The modern usage of the term often refers to artificial neural networks, which are composed of artificial neurons or nodes...
s show the connection between input and output parameters and can be used for forecasting.
- Data analysis: Detection of dependencies, Regression analysisRegression analysisIn statistics, regression analysis includes many techniques for modeling and analyzing several variables, when the focus is on the relationship between a dependent variable and one or more independent variables...
, best fitting function etc.
Calculation of enterprise characteristics
Goal:- Detect and show problems which might otherwise cause costs and time-intensive correction measures during the ramp-up phase.
- Offer mathematically calculated key performance indicators (KPI) instead of expert's "gut feelings."
- Reduce investment costs for production lines without endangering the required output quantities.
- Optimize the performance of existing production lines.
- Incorporate machine failures, availabilities (MTTRMean time to repairMean time to repair is a basic measure of the maintainability of repairable items. It represents the average time required to repair a failed component or device. Expressed mathematically, it is the total corrective maintenance time divided by the total number of corrective maintenance actions...
, MTBF) when calculating throughput numbers and utilization.
Visualization
Plant Simulation can display production sequences in 2D and in 3D. The 3D display is especially helpful as a sales tool or for in-house communication of planned measures. In addition it allows to present the entire system concept within a virtual, interactive, immersiveWiktionary
Wiktionary is a multilingual, web-based project to create a free content dictionary, available in 158 languages...
environment to non-simulation experts. The 3D engine is based on the industry standard JT format
JT (visualization format)
JT is a 3D data format developed by and is used for product visualization, collaboration, and CAD data exchange. It can contain any combination of approximate data, exact boundary representation surfaces , Product and Manufacturing Information , and Metadata either exported from the native CAD...
. CAD applications such as NX
NX
-Computing:* NX bit, a term for marking parts of computer memory as "no execute"* NX technology, a computer program that handles remote X Window System connections* NX , a CAD software product from Siemens PLM Software...
, Solid Edge
Solid Edge
Solid Edge is a 3D CAD parametric feature solid modeling software. It runs on Microsoft Windows and provides solid modeling, assembly modelling and drafting functionality for mechanical engineers...
can export models in this format. The 3D data files can be imported in the JT format
JT (visualization format)
JT is a 3D data format developed by and is used for product visualization, collaboration, and CAD data exchange. It can contain any combination of approximate data, exact boundary representation surfaces , Product and Manufacturing Information , and Metadata either exported from the native CAD...
'.jt' by using Drag-and-drop
Drag-and-drop
In computer graphical user interfaces, drag-and-drop is the action of selecting a virtual object by "grabbing" it and dragging it to a different location or onto another virtual object...
.
Used in
Plant Simulation is used in most industries. Especially in the- Automotive industry Automotive Industry Workgroup Material Flow Simulation
- Automotive suppliers
- Aerospace
- Plant manufacturing
- Mechanical engineering
- Process industry
- Electronics industry
- Consumer packaged goods industry
- Airports
- Logistics companies (transport logistics, storage logistics and production logistics)
- High bay warehouse suppliers, suppliers of automated guided vehicle systems and electric overhead monorail systems
- Consulting houses and service providers
- Shipyards Simulation Cooperation in the Maritime Industries; SimCoMar is an interest group of shipyards and suppliers, universities and institutions engaged in the simulation of shipbuilding
- Harbors, especially container terminals
Lately material flow simulation gains growing importance through the increasing use for considering the sustainability of industrial production processes. Here the characteristics of sustainable manufacturing are simulated and analyzed beforehand and then integrated into the investment decision process.
Plant Simulation is also used for research and development purposes at a great number of universities and universities of applied science.
Application history
| Year | Company | Product name |
|---|---|---|
| 1986 | The Fraunhofer Society for Factory Operation and Automation Fraunhofer Society The Fraunhofer Society is a German research organization with 60 institutes spread throughout Germany, each focusing on different fields of applied science . It employs around 18,000, mainly scientists and engineers, with an annual research budget of about €1.65 billion... develops an object-oriented, hierarchical simulation program for the Apple Macintosh |
SIMPLE Mac for Apple Macintosh |
| 1990 | AIS (Angewande Informations Systeme) founded | SIMPLE++ (Simulation in Produktion Logistik and Engineering) |
| 1991 | AIS renamed to AESOP (Angewande EDV-Systeme zur optimierten Planung) | SIMPLE++ (Simulation in Produktion Logistik und Engineering) |
| 1997 | AESOP acquired by Tecnomatix Ltd. Tecnomatix Tecnomatix Technologies, Ltd. is the leading provider of Manufacturing Process Management and Product lifecycle management software to the electronics, automotive, aerospace and heavy equipment industries, currently owned by Siemens AG... |
2000 SIMPLE++ renamed to eM-Plant |
| 2004 | Tecnomatix Ltd. Tecnomatix Tecnomatix Technologies, Ltd. is the leading provider of Manufacturing Process Management and Product lifecycle management software to the electronics, automotive, aerospace and heavy equipment industries, currently owned by Siemens AG... acquired by UGS Corporation |
2005 eM-Plant renamed to Tecnomatix Plant Simulation |
| 2007 | UGS Corporation acquired by Siemens AG Siemens AG Siemens AG is a German multinational conglomerate company headquartered in Munich, Germany. It is the largest Europe-based electronics and electrical engineering company.... |
Tecnomatix Plant Simulation |
Further reading
- Steffen Bangsow: ‘Manufacturing Simulation with Plant Simulation and SimTalk Usage and Programming with Examples and Solutions’ Springer-Verlag, Heidelberg 2009, ISBN 978-3-642-05073-2.