Helbling replicates material flows in generic simulation framework

The Zurich-based engineering and consulting firm Helbling has developed a flexible material flow simulation environment for its customers. In so doing, Helbling’s simulation experts are able to replicate dynamic material flows in complex and high-risk projects such as factory planning or process optimization, further details of which can be found in a specialist article.

With a proprietary simulation environment on the basis of commercial simulation software, Helbling solves the problem of simulations in the wrong context leading to high costs and a great deal of effort. To avoid this, Helbling has turned to standardization. To this end, Helbling is building a customer-specific library with pre-configured simulation modules. The pre-requisite for this is that the interfaces of each library object have to be compatible with the generic simulation environment.

Within a generic simulation environment, Helbling is now able to generate a variety of simulation models. A model is defined by master data such as the position and orientation of individual objects. Information about intralogistics connections and types (including conveyor technology, driverless vehicles, elevators and shuttles) is also fed into the simulation environment. Added to this is building information, 3D architectural models, parts lists for each product or shift calendars.

Based on this master data, a scenario is created that is imported into the generic simulation environment, before the model can finally be executed. “During and after a simulation run all relevant data is available in the transaction data for detailed evaluations”, as Helbling explains in the article. The data can additionally be exported for further processing in commonly used applications such as Excel and Python. ce/ko