Siemens and NVIDIA Extend Partnership to Bring Digital Twins Within Easy Reach

Siemens CEO, Roland Busch and NVIDIA Founder and CEO, Jensen Huang, shared their vision for an “industrial metaverse” at the launch of the Siemens Xcelerator business platform in Munich.

Pairing physics-based digital models from Siemens with real-time AI from NVIDIA, the companies announced they will connect the Siemens Xcelerator and NVIDIA Omniverse platforms.

The connection between Siemens Xcelerator and NVIDIA Omniverse will enable customers to develop full-design-fidelity, closed-loop digital twins.

“With our two companies, we can connect what Siemens makes with what NVIDIA makes, to AI and Omniverse”, Huang said.

“We can now fuse data from the point of design, through product life cycle management, all the way through the automation of plants to the optimization of the plant after deployment – that entire life cycle can now be in one world”, he added.

Bringing Real, Virtual Worlds Together

Siemens Xcelerator is a business platform that includes internet of things-enabled hardware, software and digital services from across Siemens that offer a comprehensive digital twin that can bring together the mechanical, electrical and software domains.

Siemens is a leader in industrial automation and software, infrastructure, building technology and transportation, and their solutions are used across the manufacturing lifecycle, from designing products and the equipment to manufacture them in factories to controlling and tracking how the equipment moves and orchestrating the flow of people, parts and machines across the factory itself.

The company has built a rich portfolio of hardware and software solutions that are part of the Siemens Xcelerator platform, which is now at the center of an ecosystem of more than 50 certified partners.

The NVIDIA Omniverse 3D collaboration and simulation development platform delivers photorealistic rendering capabilities and advanced AI to the Siemens Xcelerator ecosystem, allowing the digital twin to be represented in full-design fidelity, and operating in real-time.

Working Side by Side

During Wednesday’s event, Busch and Huang outlined their plans, showed a demo video of these technologies working together, and sat down for an informal fireside chat with Milan Nedeljkovic, a member of the board of management of BMW.

“The digital twin itself is not the challenge. The challenge is to link into this digital twin the existing systems one by one, and to have any change in the digital twin being reverted in the original planning tools”, Nedeljkovic said, outlining BMW’s plans to create sophisticated digital models of its manufacturing process that are linked, in real-time- to real-world factories.

Transforming Businesses

With the connection of Siemens Xcelerator and NVIDIA Omniverse, manufacturing customers of any size will be able to immediately analyze issues, identify root causes, and simulate and optimize solutions, thanks to the AI-infused, real-time photorealistic virtual environments, Busch and Huang said.

BMW’s iFACTORY

The two CEOs continued the fireside chat with BMW AG’s Member of the Board of Management, Dr. Milan Nedeljković.

Nedeljković outlined the carmaker’s initiative, dubbed iFACTORY, to make its factories “lean, green and digital”. And he explained how BMW Group is working with both Siemens and NVIDIA to move this effort forward.

He mentioned, “By the end of next year, BMW will offer 13 fully electrified cars. So we are changing our equipment, we are changing our production environment, we are changing our processes, and all of that needs good planning, and, again, digitization is a part of it”.

Siemens and NVIDIA are continuing to help BMW with this digital transformation with the companies committing to collaborate to develop BMW’s factory in Debrecen, Hungary.

BMW is moving fast, planning to get the factory running by 2025. This means Siemens and NVIDIA, who will help BMW model the factory, will need to move fast, too.