At the Hannover Messe 2017, The central focus of the 3,500 m² booth in Hall 9 will be on the company‘s further extended portfolio for the achievement of end-to-end digitalisation, known as the „Digital Enterprise“. An array of examples from practice will allow visitors to experience applications and innovations demonstrating the competitive benefits to be gained by merging the real and the virtual worlds. These include greater flexibility, efficiency and quality as well as a reduced time-to-market. The examples on show range from smart energy management systems through customised food and pharmaceutical production to industrial-scale additive manufacturing based on innovative automation and drive technology. Siemens is also driving forward the expansion of its cloud-based, open IoT operating system MindSphere with the addition of new partnerships, interfaces and apps.
The rapidly changing requirements of consumers are placing manufacturers under increasing pressure to produce customised products at short notice while assuring a consistently optimised standard of quality. The key to addressing all these demands is digitalisation, which allows producers to simulate, test and optimise products, production processes and plants within a completely virtual environment on the basis of a „digital twin“. In this way, not only can the manufacturing and process industries significantly enhance their innovation speed and productivity, but they can also define their own new business models. „Only companies who digitalise their processes comprehensively will remain competitive“, explained Jan Mrosik, CEO of the Digital Factory Division, at the press conference prior to the Hannover trade fair.
For companies from the process industries aiming to embrace digitalisation, the existence of brownfield plants as well as diverse systems and components plays a key role. „To utilise the opportunities offered by digitalisation for legacy systems, open standards, efficient communication networks and integrated automation and drive technologies are hugely important,“ explains Jürgen Brandes, CEO of the Process Industries and Drives Division. „Also vital is the ability to efficiently create and maintain the digital twin of a plant or its sub-systems. We rely here on partnerships such as our cooperation with Bentley Systems, which enables our customers to integrate realistic 3D models into our engineering system Comos – even for existing plants. This allows operators to significantly improve the productivity, efficiency and reliability of their plants through simulation and virtual commissioning.“ One of the most significant innovations on show at the Hannover Messe is Version 9 of the Simatic PCS 7 process control system, which works with the engineering tool Comos on the basis of a shared data platform. This version supports the Industrial Ethernet standard Profinet with two new I/O lines for end-to-end digitalisation down to the field level. These benefits are supported by Siemens expertise in industrial communication networks for the Digital Enterprise.
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