Product Q&A: Simulation innovations

Digitalisation and vehicular autonomy are just two arenas in which software will be the leading driver of innovation, but what do leaders in some of the most influential software companies make of current and emerging trends, and what solutions will they offer to stay ahead of the game?

The Engineer has sought the opinions of Olivier Roll, Lead Solutions Engineer for Europe at ANSYS, Alan Prior, Senior Director, Technical Sales, Dassault Systèmes, and Paul Haimes, VP Europe Technical Sales at PTC to discuss the ways in which their solutions are driving product innovation and the changes taking place in industry that are accelerating innovation and growth.

Paul Haimes (PH): We see many manufacturing organisations revisiting OEE (overall equipment effectiveness) and the need to better understand factory performance.  We see PTC customers’ looking at IoT technologies, such as PTC’s ThingWorx Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) platform, as a way to improve OEE calculations – not by replacing existing OT infrastructure, but by connecting it to our IoT platform via our Kepware technology.  Deployment of ThingWorx as part of a Smart Factory infrastructure captures a more detailed understanding of equipment availability, performance and quality through existing and secondary instrumentation - enabling OEE comparison between cells, between lines or between a global network of factories.  These insights are the first step towards realising better performance and unlocking other Industry 4.0 use-cases such as Predictive Maintenance and Connected Workers.