Enabling the Factory of the Future

Managing your Product Performance Lifecycle

In order to develop smarter products, and the emerging class of autonomous products, designers and engineers must anticipate multiple unknowns and associated risks. Among these are the somewhat unclear ways different sensors and systems, upon which “intelligent” products rely, may interact and function/dysfunction together. Furthermore, it becomes increasingly critical to be able to predict system faults, that can result from design weaknesses, fabrication defects, or wear and tear, and to mitigate detrimental consequences right from the conception phase. Here, simulation has a huge and critical role to play.

“ESI’s innovative strategy to combine Virtual Prototyping with data-driven analytics and the immersive Virtual Reality experience enables industrial manufacturers to maximize the useful and reliable operational lifetime of their products through constant performance management. Product Performance Lifecycle (PPL) strongly differentiates ESI from traditional PLM vendors.”

Simulating use cases for virtual “smart” products equipped with virtual sensors creates huge volumes of data. This parallels the ominous swell of data coming from various real sensors, as in our vehicles, phones, homes, and all the other “smart” objects in our daily life that are increasingly interconnected through the pervasive growth of the “Internet of Things”. In this context it is essential and critical that not only data analysts, but also engineers, designers and other stakeholders learn how to make sense of and create value out of, the mass of “big data” and to benefit from intelligence continuously created.

With recent acquisitions of pioneering technologies in System Modeling, Cloud delivery, Data Analytics, and Machine Learning, ESI has dramatically extended the customer value of its core business of Virtual Prototyping, and made it more accessible. Indeed, ESI is introducing a complete and transformational offering to help industrial manufacturers develop what has been coined as the Hybrid Twin™ of their real-world product; one that can be used to make smarter decisions in all product lifecycle stages; from design, development, testing, fabrication, operations and maintenance-repair to phase-out. With the Factory of the Future aiming at interconnecting every step of the manufacturing process for higher end quality and reliability, manufacturers are now able to leapfrog their traditional “Product Lifecycle Management” (PLM), which focuses on design and development, and manage instead their “Product Performance Lifecycle” (PPL) to anticipate the entire operational life of a product far beyond its manufacturing.

Read the full article on “Preparing for the Factory of the Future Managing your Product Performance Lifecycle”.

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Keep Reading: Delivering the Hybrid Twin™