A year ahead at Siemens
The Consumer Electronics Show (CES) is one of the largest displays of what technology is being developed, manufactured, and refined around the world. But not all technology is as visible or tangible as what fills the CES floor. It is in everyday things making buildings safer, more comfortable, and more sustainable. Technology is in the power grids to make them more reliable and renewable. Transportation is becoming safer, and greener. Even healthcare benefits, becoming more equitable and effective.
Siemens is working on all of the hidden technologies that are making life better for ourselves and the world. But 2024 is a turning point. We can build and use technology faster than ever because we can combine the real and the digital worlds. To aid engineers working through an expanding set of requirements for complex product design, digitalization helps accelerate the design cycles that can traditionally take years and vast capital investments.
To talk about the need for a digital approach to design, manufacturing, and operations, our CEO and Siemen’s President Dr. Roland Busch took the stage at CES and outlined why 2024 will be a turning point for businesses around the world.
Two of the big technologies he highlighted were generative artificial intelligence and the industrial metaverse, both as a means to make the technologies we are already using faster and easier. The focus of industrial metaverse needs to be “industry,” while the idea to recreate and augment the real world in the virtual is important to the concept as in the consumer world, the focus on industry requires understanding more of where a material or product comes from, how it is interacted with, and what can be done to improve an iterate upon the product. And bringing it back to acceleration through digitalization, processes completed in the industrial metaverse can be iterated much more rapidly than those conducted in the real world with associated costs, delays, and energy consumption.
A product designed in the digital world, with relevant data available to designers and manufacturers, can be made more sustainable and manufactured more sustainably. The cost of a tweak is minimized, but so is the cost of bringing more eyes to a problem. By virtualizing development, stakeholders from around the world can more easily provide input and optimize the product – a machine operator can apply their understanding to a product before a final design reaches their facility. And it can happen without the need for costly travels between factories and offices in different regions.
Making the industrial metaverse possible, however, requires lots of data from designers, simulations, factory environments, and even from the field to improve. This is where the second technology Roland mentioned comes into play – artificial intelligence. An automated factory creates large volumes of data every month, from quality and environmental measures during production to continuous camera feeds used in computer vision applications. AI helps turn that data into actionable information. Patterns in machine operation can become flags for earlier maintenance procedures. Quality measurements can result in a design change to improve manufacturing outcomes. And what might seem like small insights from workers on the floor can result in better outcomes in the factory environment. That last one is possible in partnership with Microsoft and Siemen’s Industrial Co-Pilot – making error and problem reporting even easier from the shop floor. Siemens is also partnering with Amazon Web Services to bring generative AI to our low-code platform Mendix, through a model-agnostic service.
For more information on how the industrial metaverse is changing the design shop and factory floor, or how AI is revolutionizing enterprise data, be sure to watch the full keynote from CES 2024.
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Siemens Digital Industries Software helps organizations of all sizes digitally transform using software, hardware and services from the Siemens Xcelerator business platform. Siemens’ software and the comprehensive digital twin enable companies to optimize their design, engineering and manufacturing processes to turn today’s ideas into the sustainable products of the future. From chips to entire systems, from product to process, across all industries. Siemens Digital Industries Software – Accelerating transformation.
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