Accelerate vehicle development and production with Siemens’ Digital Enterprise — our unique approach to uniting the real and digital worlds. Meet the major trends currently reshaping the automotive industry through digital transformation.
Several major trends are currently reshaping the automotive industry, including electrified mobility, additional sustainability regulations, changing investor expectations and the ongoing push for connected and autonomous vehicles. To stay competitive, companies must innovate and adapt their entire value chain, from design and production to use, as well as their supply chains.
Siemens Digital Thread connects performance, sustainability and design data across engineering teams. Vehicle lead engineers can track development progress and ensure that all performance and sustainability requirements are met.
The Digital Twin, combined with high-fidelity exploration and AI capabilities, enables the rapid generation of thousands of design options to quickly discover the most efficient, sustainable and cost-effective configuration.
Test every aspect of a design digitally, evaluating structure, safety and performance under real conditions that are difficult or impossible to replicate physically, ensuring quality and reliability.
The software-defined vehicle paradigm brings significant opportunities for automotive companies to develop innovative vehicles with new sales and service models. However, this transition coincides with significant challenges, including growing vehicle complexity, shifting workforces, faster timelines and growing pressure to account for sustainability from the very beginning of development. Companies that pursue digitalization will build closed-loop development methods that incorporate design, verification, validation, production and operation. With unprecedented connectivity, these automakers will unlock their data to make intelligent and environmentally conscious decisions, enhance agility, reduce cost and set new industry standards for sustainable vehicle development.
Improvements to production efficiency begin with detailed manufacturing planning. The virtual approach boosts productivity and minimizes waste. As production system designs are refined, virtual commissioning connects virtual models to real control systems, streamlining the process of implementing machine tools according to the production concept. Digitalization also facilitates the design and implementation of flexible production methods, enabling automakers to reconfigure production facilities to enhance efficiency or respond to market changes. Modular production concepts and automated guided vehicle (AGV) systems can be created and simulated to ensure efficient operations, resolving logistics bottlenecks before any physical work begins.
End-to-end digitalization simplifies the incorporation of advanced production technologies, such as additive manufacturing. These technologies optimize the weight and strength of vehicle components, resulting in safer, more fuel-efficient vehicles. Handling heavy battery packs requires strong, power-hungry robots with large grippers for assembly. Big robots mean big power consumption. Generative design can be used to create a new, smaller, lightweight gripper. An AI-driven configurator application uses topology optimization in NX to reduce design cost and time and improve performance. The only production method for this lightweight gripper is additive manufacturing. To ensure that the new design works as expected, it can be validated by simulating the entire manufacturing step.
