BMW and Nvidia have been collaborating on a number of projects for quite some time now but it looks like the two companies have a lot more planned for the future. Today, they announced a joint venture, as BMW is going to be using the Omniverse platform from now on in its research and development phase for new cars. The virtual factory planning tool integrates a range of planning data and applications and allows real-time collaboration with unrestricted compatibility.
“Together we’re about to make a huge leap forward and open up completely new perspectives in the field of virtual, digital planning. In the future a virtual representation of our production network will allow us to realize an innovative, integrated approach to our planning processes. Omniverse greatly enhances the precision, speed and consequently the efficiency of our planning processes,” said Milan Nedeljković, BMW AG Board Member for Production.
Virtual factory planning is already used in the industry, but until now it has required data to be imported from various applications. This is not only time-consuming but also raises compatibility issues. In addition, the data is not always up to date. In the future, the Omniverse platform will enable live data to be collected and collated from all the relevant databases to create a joint simulation – eliminating the need to reimport data.
The goal is to enable modifications and adjustments to be assessed in the early stages of planning in order to create an overall view. This extreme transparency will allow planners and production specialists to plan highly complex production systems even more quickly and accurately, without interface losses or compatibility problems. Omniverse integrates data from various professional design and planning tools from a range of different producers and uses it to generate photo-realistic real-time simulations in a single collaborative setting.
Another big advantage of the Omniverse platform is that workers and engineers from around the world can simply tap in whenever they need, to either check something or make changes to the process or product. Furthermore, Omniverse can be used in a lot of different scenarios too, from using real-time data which is synchronized across the cloud infrastructure, to logistics planning. The ability to carry out changes live will speed up decision-making noticeably.
