The commissioning of complex applications and production systems often takes several days or weeks and is associated with considerable downtimes in which the system has to be taken out of production. Virtual development and testing environments can speed up the implementation on site considerably. In a recent case the blow moulding specialist Kautex Maschinenbau was able to reduce the on-site commissioning of a new system control to a single day.
Kautex Maschinenbau
Kautex Maschinenbau reduces on-site commissioning of a new system control
The change in control was the optimisation of the cycle time on the post-processing station of a Kautex KBB400D blow moulding machine in Spain. The new control change initially developed in the Kautex factory in Bonn, Germany, and tested on a virtual post-processing station (IntelliGate module). It was only then that the commissioning at the customer's production location in Spain was carried out by a service technician on site.
The service technician received support from a virtually linked Kautex programmer. The complete process on site with commissioning and final adjustments took only one day. It was therefore possible to restart the system after just half the amount of time that was originally calculated.
Project manager Dirk Hiller of Kautex sees a great deal of potential in the process: "The simulation process which we use for pre-commissioning and testing on virtual Kautex systems reduces time and staffing requirements for the implementation on site. Digital twinning of our machines means that we are now in a better position to adapt the control of the production system to changing conditions and production requirements more quickly."
