Industrial technology meets up with Silicon Valley magic.

Siemens (ETR: SIE) launched its Xcelerator business platform in Munich last month. The platform includes internet-of-things -enabled hardware, software and digital services from across Siemens that offer a comprehensive digital twin that can bring together the mechanical, electrical and software domains. At the launch, Siemens CEO Roland Busch and NVIDIA (NASDAQ: NVDA) Founder and CEO Jensen Huang proposed the creation of an “industrial metaverse” by combining the Siemens Xcelerator and NVIDIA Omniverse platforms. (NVIDIA)

NVIDIA, Siemens to create digital twins

NVIDIA Omniverse is a multi-GPU scalable virtual world engine that enables teams to connect 3D design and CAD applications for collaborative design workflows and allows users to build physically accurate virtual worlds for training, testing and operating AI agents such as robots and autonomous machines.

When combined, the Xcelerator and Omniverse present powerful capabilities.

“With our two companies we can connect what Siemens makes with what NVIDIA makes, to AI and Omniverse,” Huang said. “We can now fuse data from the point of design, all the way through product life cycle management, all the way through the automation of plants to the optimization of the plant after deployment — that entire life cycle can now be in one world.”

How it works

By combining their skills manufacturing customers across the world could hope for huge benefits.

• Analyze shop floor issues/problems, identify root causes, and simulate and optimize solutions, thanks to the AI-infused, real-time photorealistic virtual environments
• Turn data streaming from the factory floor PLCs and sensors into AI models. These models can be used to continuously optimize performance, predict problems, reduce energy consumption, and streamline the flow of parts and materials across the factory floor.
• Virtual simulation: For example, energy and utility plant engineers can virtually navigate through the live digital twin of a facility to analyze the thermal distribution produced by the existing air conditioning system from Siemens simulations.

“If you look at almost every engineering project today of any significant complexity, we simulate the product before we go to production,” Huang said. “And yet, for most plants and most factories, it’s nearly impossible to do that today … and so we needed to create a very large-scale simulation platform: Omniverse.”

Siemens and NVIDIA are helping BMW (ETR: BMW) realize its vision of the “lean, green, and digital” iFACTORY. The carmaker plans to offer 13 fully electrified cars by the end of next year.

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