With such a digital twin, managers can test ways to get the most out of production lines, find and eliminate bottlenecks, experiment with different routing and control strategies, and optimize the placement and sizes of work-in-process buffers much more quickly than before. This accelerates the deployment of new production processes and time to market and reduces risks. At essentially no cost, they can explore alternatives, test the ability of their initial layouts to handle different product flow or demand scenarios, and make refinements virtually before committing capital investments. By incorporating simulation, they can now perform all these functions without the expense of building. But they typically then have built the physical system, experimented with it, and then fine-tuned it as they began operating the plant.
Manufacturing process modeling software software#
Industrial engineers have long used computer-aided design (CAD) software to design such things as the physical layout of shop floors and materials-handling systems. The low cost of this capability means that firms of all sizes can now take advantage of this digital wizardry in a variety of areas: A notebook computer can now house a simulation model for designing and fine-tuning a complex assembly line or a call center and can provide remarkable insights for several thousand dollars per user. We also sold our high-end visualization systems for $1 million - today a consumer gaming system from Nintendo or Sony does a lot better for less than $500. Back then a system such as a Cray C932 cost $32 million, and it had performance comparable to today’s Apple A12 Bionic processor found in an iPhone XS. In 1997, when I ran high-end marketing for Silicon Graphics/Cray Research, we sold simulation systems for critical applications such as flight and weapons-control systems and running complex facilities such as power plants. Insight CenterĮxamining the challenges and opportunities that lie ahead.Īll of that computing power used to be quite expensive. By the 1990s, simulation had been solidly embraced in engineering design, chemistry, the modeling of oilfield reservoirs, weather forecasting, and a wide range of other computationally intense fields. The development of computer graphics and visualization systems changed this dramatically: Computer animations helped people to visualize the results of all that mathematical modeling in an accessible way. But for many decades, computer outputs took the form of enormous tables of numbers that required an expert to interpret.
Manufacturing process modeling software drivers#
One of the earliest drivers of the development of digital computers was the desire to calculate things like projectile trajectories quickly or run mathematical models that would speed up the development of other weapons systems. Organizations have long been using computers to simulate the physical world. While they might not be quite the equivalent of their high-end brethren, they can help accelerate the ramp-up of new product designs into volume manufacturing and can facilitate continuous process improvement. Modern personal computers and a new generation of software simulation tools can now bring these powerful modeling and visualization capabilities to small and mid-size firms as well. Many large corporations have invested in digital twins: photorealistic virtual replicas of products or operations from the physical world.