More and more plants today require the revamping of electronics, networks and therefore software.
The plants of 10-15 years ago, even if created with the cutting-edge technology of the time, despite still guaranteeing high levels of real productivity today, suffer from numerous disadvantages in terms of maintenance, spare-parts and cybersecurity.
Many of the main automation components such as PLCs and inverters have in fact gone out of production, and in the event of failures, companies can only rely on the warehouse or in the after-market trade.
The internal communication networks of these machines use now obsolete technologies, which show countless critical issues in the field of IT security.
The devices used are often incompatible with their latest-generation counterparts, thus precluding any changes aimed at increasing productivity or diversifying the product offering.
There are therefore numerous and pressing reasons that would push the managers to prepare a Revamp process for their plants, unfortunately a sense of reluctance to this hypothesis is also very widespread.
It follows that often the revamp is started urgently only when situations that are difficult to sustain have already been triggered.
The reasons for this reluctance are very concrete, in fact:
– The plants in question have been subjected to years of optimization and tested to react efficiently to recurring stress-events;
– The plants have often reached the maximum level of productivity achievable by the physics of the plant;
– The managers fear that it is not possible to obtain the same level of productivity, optimization, and reliability immediately after the update;
– There is a fear that the product after the revamping will be qualitatively different from the one before, causing marketing difficulties and risk of returns;
– Maintenance personnel who know the plant well and all production personnel would need to be re-trained after the revamping;
– The replacement of the automation and the rewriting of the PLC programs, although necessary for the revamping, is extremely sensitive in the case of plants for which it is necessary that the product after the modifications remains indistinguishable from the previous one; for example in food plants of “historical” products;
– The downtime required for such an impactful change on the plants is difficult to integrate into the company’s production planning.
Revamping is a complex procedure, which requires a complete backward engineering of the production process involved, and the study of an implementation strategy that allows the updating of the systems with the least possible impact on the production planning of the company involved.
From this point of view, the possibility of having a digital twin on which to simulate the new HW/SW architecture and compare it with the real plant has numerous and valuable advantages, some linked to the efficiency of the revamping process itself:
1- Support for hardware redesign, for the choice of replacement devices based on the performance of the pre-existing ones;
2- Support for backward engineering work, and consequent time-optimization in the creation of the SW;
3- Possibility of comparing the performance between the old real plant and the new simulated plant, with a basis for the correct estimation of yield and efficiency rates;
4- Possibility of recreating past stress-events, as reported by customers, to test the reliability of the revamping;
5- Sharing the revamp results with the customer before the physical intervention on the plant, in order to validate its operability.
Other advantages are related to the future use of the simulated platform for plant management:
6- Use of the simulated platform for training operators and maintenance personnel;
7- Use of the simulated platform for predictive maintenance, given the possibility of simulating the operating load of each individual motor or actuator;
8- Opening up to new margins of optimization, which can be explored on the simulated platform without downtime on the real plant.
Revamping activities were designed in the past following a purely theoretical approach, then tested in vivo on the revamped plant and during production.
The result was almost inexorably the need for changes and corrections in the field, with serious repercussions on start-up times and maximum achievable performance.
With the use of a digital twin it is possible not only to resolve the common critical issues of a revamping, but also to reduce the necessary down-time, evaluate future performance and have a tool that will be very useful in the future management of the plant itself.
One should not exclude, among the advantages of creating a digital twin, the promotion in the customer of that sense of security necessary to make the decision to modernize the plant and make it cutting-edge again, allowing it to explore new and unprecedented margins of productivity increase.
Least but not last, It should be emphasized that digital twin technology can also be applied to the original software to better understand its functioning, and simulate its behaviour in critical situations that are difficult to implement in practice, and then compare the results with the renewed software and evaluate any improvements.
