VREX: Digital Twin for the Manufacturing Industry

In the innovation project "Virtual Reality Extension for Digital Twins of Machine Tools (VREX-DTMT)," ETH Zurich, industrial partners Siemens, Reishauer, and VR startup Sensoryx, along with RhySearch, collaborate to develop a digital twin for machine tools.

Digital twins, which virtually represent processes, products, and machines, offer new value creation opportunities, particularly in the manufacturing sector. With support from Innosuisse, the Swiss Innovation Promotion Agency, which provides nearly CHF 460,000 in funding, this project aims to unlock these potentials for the Swiss machine tool industry. The project not only increases the maturity of digital twins in the machinery industry but also examines specific benefits through collision avoidance and training for service technicians.

Manufacturing complex geometries on machine tools requires careful selection of tools and equipment. However, increasingly compact machine tools mean that active components are closer together, increasing the risk of collisions that can lead to machine damage. Current simulation tools reduce this risk, but new manufacturing processes still need to be manually fine-tuned at a slow pace. The digital twin being developed in the project simulates the entire manufacturing process before production starts. This is expected to not only completely avoid collisions but also significantly simplify and shorten the laborious process of introducing new processes.

The second use case, based on the aforementioned digital twin, focuses on training for service technicians. Currently, maintenance and repair processes, which are typical tasks for service technicians, are trained on real machine tools. This means that a technician often has to travel to a training center located thousands of kilometers away, and operational machines must be disassembled and reassembled for training purposes. With the digital twin, which not only looks like the real machine but also has the same functionality, the high opportunity costs of current training can be drastically reduced. Service technicians can conduct location and time-independent training using VR goggles.

The implementation partners expect the project's results to yield not only competitive and cost advantages but also energy savings, as the energy consumption of the digital twin is negligible compared to a real machine tool.