DIGITALIZATION OF PRODUCT ENGINEERING

ESI proposes “sustainable” product development via virtual prototyping to ensure operational safety and comfort for off-highway machines.

Today's off-highway machines must be safe, clean and productive - in a word: “sustainable,” an adjective that also should apply to product development. How can engineers know they are on the right track without producing a bunch of physical prototypes? How can they avoid costly design changes late in the process? And how can the useful life of machines be extended? The digitalization of product engineering is here to answer these challenges by enabling the evaluation of product performance at every stage of product development, as well as during manufacturing and operations.

The goal at ESI is to help customers move towards “zero tests,” “zero prototypes” and “zero downtime” - referring to physical tests/prototypes, of course. Traditional methods for testing and evaluating products virtually using sporadic simulations, usually only of the nominal machine, are useful but only reflect specific conditions. They occasionally fall short of what can be learned when those products are rolled out to actual construction sites, farms, forests or mines. To avoid such shortcomings, leading enterprises in the heavy-machinery sector, including Liebherr and Siemens Minerals, employ virtual prototyping solutions to get a realistic account of how multiple subsystems behave and interact in real life under varying conditions.