Digital CE conformity

A new vehicle model is to be intro­duced to the market quickly, a cur­rent product should be reworked in a short time – but it often takes months or even years until the pro­duc­tion chain is con­verted and ready for the new require­ments. To shorten the time to market launch and increase com­pet­i­tive­ness, pro­duc­tion in the auto­mo­tive and sup­plier industry must move away from plant-spe­cific machinery and soft­ware and embrace dynam­i­cally adapt­able pro­duc­tion with a uni­form soft­ware frame­work. The research project SDM4FZI (Soft­ware-defined Man­u­fac­turing for the vehicle and sup­plier industry) is being spon­sored by the German Fed­eral Min­istry for Eco­nomic Affairs and Cli­mate Action (BMWi) over the next three years and is working on the rel­e­vant require­ments.

The basis: dig­ital twins of the existing plants. These can be used to effi­ciently pre­pare and imple­ment improve­ments while pro­duc­tion is run­ning. In addi­tion, how­ever, the con­trol and com­mu­ni­ca­tion infra­struc­ture must be com­pat­ible with soft­ware-defined man­u­fac­turing – as must the safety of the machinery.

A digital safety concept

That’s where Pilz comes in: “The safety-related assess­ment of a plant is a highly manual process that is largely per­formed without tech­nical aids. Any assisted or even auto­mated func­tion thus directly results in increased effi­ciency,” explains Matthias Schweiker, Dipl.-Ing., Advance Devel­op­ment at Pilz. As part of the research asso­ci­a­tion made up of automa­tion, mechan­ical engi­neering, IT and the auto­mo­tive sector, Pilz is working on tool-sup­ported CE con­for­mity. This includes defining and eval­u­ating impor­tant safety para­me­ters for dig­ital rep­re­sen­ta­tion of a plant and auto­mat­i­cally detecting safety-crit­ical recon­fig­u­ra­tions on a plant. Addi­tional work pack­ages include topics con­cerning con­nec­tivity and secu­rity. As soon as all work pack­ages are defined, the indi­vidual teams will start working.