Plant simulation and optimization in the cloud

3D Simulation of complex manufacturing environments, specifically in the field of automated iron beams production plants, is characterized by a high level of computational charge that requires high performance hardware and software platforms as well as long calculation times. For this reason, up to now, the Ficep Group has applied these tools only at technical office level, where the dedicated hardware can be found, and only during the advanced design phase of the plant. Nevertheless, simulation and optimization results would be useful also in the early commercial stage and not only by Ficep premises, but also during technical meetings at customer sites. With the current computational resources demand of the software, it would be impossible to make these functionalities available on portable and multi-platform devices such as tablets, or light notebooks, which represent the typical equipment of product managers. Thus, the idea behind this experiment is adapting TTS simulation and production optimization engine to run in the cloud, centralizing both the computational burden and the significant amount of plant data on high performance hardware, exposing their functionalities both through thin multi-platform client applications and through functional web services exploitable by third party software currently used to manage production orders. In such a way, it would be possible, on the one hand, to provide the means to run production simulations and optimization remotely, displaying only some selected performance indicators, which are relevant to the current client user, and, on the other hand, to allow the integration with order management software, which often accompanies the plant. Finally, in particular when dealing with optimization of large production plans, it would of be of great impact to rely on HPC platforms because it would reduce the software response times, improving the what if analysis both by the technical office and at the customer premises.