Virtual commissioning

Manufacturing systems need to be increasingly flexible to cope with the demands placed on them – changing product requirements, volumes, and availability of supply all require flexibility to manage.

• Commissioning is the process of designing, purchasing, programming, installing, and testing a manufacturing system. It is a complex and time-consuming process. Reacting to changing manufacturing requirements may require a system to be recommissioning depending on the scope of change, and the time and cost of this contributes to the difficulty of low-batch production.
• Virtual commissioning is a method by which a manufacturing system is designed, programmed, and tested virtually with a sufficiently high degree of accuracy that the design and program code can be deployed to the physical line immediately with only a small amount of extra testing.
• FA3D2 is a highly reconfigurable, flexible system able to produce a wide range of aerospace components, and is designed from the ground up to take advantage of virtual commissioning. This allows for the system to be being prepared for the next product or challenge while still producing the current product, reducing the downtime to completely change the system from months to days.
• This is achieved with tightly integrated high-fidelity simulation approach, control emulators, and a management process for the deployment of virtually tested code.