Digital twin enables retrofit at the weekend

Modernization desired? Yes, but please only if the plant is available again on Monday. The digital twin of an intralogistics system provides planning reliability and shortens the implementation phase.

Many companies shy away from a necessary plant modernization. With the right preparation for implementation, downtimes and machine downtimes can be reduced to a minimum. The solution: As an emulation of the control technology and all connected systems, a digital twin maps the entire plant. It not only simulates controls and machines, but also the behaviour of the people working on the plant. This digital image of the real environment is an ideal test platform for IT solutions that will later control all machines, such as the UniWare warehouse management system. Programming optimizations can thus be implemented before the real commissioning. The emulation of the material flow system together with the UniWare Unitechnik software maps a complete digital twin of the logistics centre when the programming work is completed. This can be used, for example, to train the customer's employees before the plant is converted.

Retrofit at the weekend
"With this approach we have already successfully completed projects for several of our customers. We have implemented the retrofit at the plant of our customer BENTELER exclusively on weekends when the plant was not in operation", says Michael Huhn, sales manager and member of the board of Unitechnik Systems GmbH. For BENTELER, it was especially important to modernize the drive, control and instrumentation technology without interfering with operation. The preparatory work on control and drive technology was carried out over several weekends. The final reconstruction including the conversion of the warehouse management system was mastered thanks to extensive tests on a long weekend. Unitechnik thus carried out the extensive interventions in the automation system with minimal restrictions for the ongoing operation. With success. Since then, BENTELER has benefited from a highly available plant, low repair and downtimes and increased operational safety for the employees.