Study Details Future of Holistic Digital Factory Models

CONTACT Software, Fraunhofer IGCV, and Ingenics Consulting reviewed the results of a study conducted with five partners on holistic digital factory models.

New demands and competitive pressure are pressuring companies to adapt their factories quickly. The new study “Holistic Digital Factory Models” identifies the resulting challenges and presents solutions for factory operators through eight key theses. Doctoral candidates in the field of factory planning assessed these solutions based on the current state of research in literature.

A key finding is the transformation of factory planning: it is evolving into a continuous, short-cycle task, which makes an ongoing information flow across the lifecycle essential.

Experts notethat there is currently a lack of collaboration and seamless information exchange between the building and production system domains. The participants discussed incentives and methods to improve the situation, such as Building Information Modeling (BIM). Whether Common Data Environments (CDE) are necessary remains an open question, as participants also consider interfaces to be sufficient.

Experts confirmed the hypothesis that while companies primarily rely on Office and CAD software today, simulation tools, BIM, and PLM software will complement these in the future. The role of digital twins in factory planning was assessed as ambiguous, although the relevance of static and dynamic data was emphasized. Regarding the Industrial Metaverse, there was consensus that it is still too underexplored for practical applications in factory planning.

In conclusion, the experts underscored that standardizing factory planning processes remains a great challenge. While the literature offers methods, experts find them unfamiliar or insufficient. Companies would need to customize generic methods individually to their specific needs and implement them as a company-wide standard.

For the authors, this points out the need for further research. This applies in particular to cross-lifecycle information consistency, the effective use of digital twins for factory planners, and the potential of the Industrial Metaverse. Additionally, it is necessary to develop existing specialized processes and methods. This development is underway at organizations like buildingSMART Germany e.V. and VDI (Verein Deutscher Ingenieure e. V., Association of German Engineers).

The detailed study results are available here.

Sources: Press materials received from the company and additional information gleaned from the company’s website.