Every one of the BMW Group's automobile factories will be digitally scanned by the beginning of 2023. The corporation is methodically fusing the physical and digital worlds in this way in order to take advantage of the great potential for extremely effective development of future plant architectures and manufacturing facilities.
Virtual planning, together with data science and AI, is a crucial component of digitalization in the BMW iFACTORY, the company's long-term strategy plan for manufacturing. All processes and the whole production system are to be completely virtualized during planning and simulation. By enabling real-time cooperation between several sites and across various time zones, virtualization raises the bar for planning for all operations.
In collaboration with NavVis, the BMW Group is digitising its current facilities. The Munich firm is regarded as one of the top technological suppliers in the world for digital twins and reality capture.
By the beginning of 2023, all BMW Group car factories will have photorealistic panoramic views, floor plans, and scatter plots that are exact to the smallest detail and include all building structures, amenities, and outdoor spaces.
By the beginning of 2023, mobile 3D laser scanners will be utilised to produce photorealistic panoramic views, floor plans, and scatter plots for all BMW Group car plants that are exact to the last detail and include all building structures, amenities, and outdoor spaces.
At BMW Group operations, about four million square metres of indoor area and nine million square metres of outdoor space have been scanned since November 2020 using mobile portable scanning equipment and drone systems. The massive amounts of data will subsequently be used by the NavVis IVION Enterprise platform to produce a digital twin of reality.
The BMW Group will work with NVIDIA and its Omniverse software platform to create whole new manufacturing structures in the future.
Utilizing a cloud- and web-based application called the BMW Factory Viewer, about 15,000 BMW employees are now dealing with the data. Existing facilities may be digitally inspected with the aid of this programme, particular production sites can be located using points of interest (POIs), and extremely accurate measurements can be made.
Additionally, the technology enables the 3D scans to be divided into separate pieces and made available to outside vendors, for example. This reduces the amount of time and effort required for production planning, fosters better communication between internal and external interfaces, and obviates planning mistakes.
Using the so-called re-scan procedure, 3D scanning technology also enables both small- and large-scale remodelling projects at BMW factories to be rapidly and simply transferred to the digital realm.
To maintain the digital master data current over the long term without adding to its staff's workload, the corporation is focusing on constructing its own autonomous scanning robots. The BMW Group is employing internal solutions for this aim, such the Smart Transport Robot (STR) created by BMW Group subsidiary IDEALWORKS.