Patrick Lunz explains how Siemens uses AI to enable engineers and automate production effectively.
For Patrick Lunz, head of media relations for Digital Industries at Siemens, the focus for the upcoming Hannover Messe, held in Hannover, Germany, from March 31 to April 4, will be on artificial intelligence and all the ways it is affecting the manufacturing process.
“It’s all about industrial AI, right?” he asked at the recent press preview for Hannover Messe. “This is a high hype cycle, but we at Siemens believe that it will fundamentally change the way industry is operating.”
Lunz said that Siemens already sees that change as they deploy industrial AI with their customers.
“For instance, visual inspection, but also generative AI. This is changing the way our customers will engineer and operate their production in the future. And that’s what we’re going to show at Hannover Messe this year,” he said. “We have a pharma showcase where we show end to end, from lab to patient, how we speed up pharmaceutical production. We’ve seen in the COVID-19 pandemic that time is of the essence. So, you need to be fast, you need to be able to ramp up production quickly. That’s what we try to show, what we can do at Siemens to help.”
As well, Lunz explained that Siemens can help their customers run tests in the virtual world, which offers efficiencies and savings over doing things the old-fashioned way.
“We have the industrial software that they can use to increase the speed of their trials and run some of them in the virtual world,” he said. “They can see what happens if they change the recipe. Or how they can set up a new production site in the industrial metaverse and figure out how to build the machine line. This is a super-efficient way to design, and you can quickly ramp up production. And then, once we get to the actual physical production, we have our entire portfolio of software, hardware, our PLCs, our drives, etc., that help to run and automate production. That’s the story we will tell at Hannover.”
There’s definitely been a huge amount of hype in AI, and Lunz noted how it’s been interesting to watch the rise (and slight correction) of Nvidia, as it’s become one of the most valuable companies in the world. But while some deride the hype around AI, he said they still believe that there is fundamental value for manufacturers in using this technology.
“It’s not just about a promise for the future, we believe it’s actually happening. Because we see that for a lot of our customers, they want to get it on the shop floor. They see the potential of how much more productivity is achievable if they use AI models for something like visual inspection,” Lunz said. “Before you actually had people looking at products on a line and thinking, ‘that looks fine.’ Now you have a camera, you scan the product, and AI is monitoring the quality. There’s really some tremendous gains in terms of productivity that a manufacturer can get here. These solutions are happening now; customers are actually using them and integrating it into their production.”
