Material Handling Tools Manual
- Pieter Weterings
Note that these articles are still under development - some you will find marked with ‘T.B.D.' or ‘To Be Determined’ meaning these articles will be filled in at a later time.
if you have any questions with regard to the articles - please leave a comment!
The Challenges of Material Handling in the Virtual World
Implementation of Material Handling is a DT project facet that is often overlooked and underestimated - both for Digital Twins aimed on validating- and visualizing the flow of Materials.
Over the years we found that particularly Determinism and Continuousness of the Simulation affect if- and how fast you can complete setting up a Material Handling Simulation. Since we could not find tooling that specifically met that demand we decided to develop it ourselves.
Furthermore, a good deal of Material Handling involves the planning of Material Hand-overs and storage in your installation. Particularly DES is designed to also offer tooling to quickly implement over-time principles normally part of the so-called ‘Real-Time System Planning’.
Many Real-Time DT solutions find themselves depending purely on Industry Standard Physics engines to enable material handling. Although using such an off-the-shelve engines may afford you great runtime performance and ease-of-use, these engines rarely afford you with means to actually validate the transformations you are enacting in the virtual world - nor does it readily allow you to extend or suppress the physical model properties.
As indicated previously - the virtual world is nothing more than a mathematical model of reality - and unless you specifically have the ability to test (and adjust) the Material Handling model you are using there is little guarantee that the simulation you see unfolding before you is relevant for your design questions.
Introducing Prespective Accurate Simulation System (PASS)
PASS’s primary purpose is to make the implementation of a Material Handling in your Digital Twin or Virtual Prototype as quick-, painless- and verifiable as possible. Depending on whether you’re looking to preview your process flow or validate your control models you will want to use different tooling.
Discrete Event Simulation (DES)
When working on a preview setup-, or when only (production) process variation- and timing is relevant you will want to use Discrete Event Simulation (DES). DES is what a mechanical engineer would call - Kinematic - meaning ‘Simulating Motion without considering Force’. Arguably this way of simulating moving parts is more akin to creating a standard 3D animation: the transformations and material interaction are continuously calculated over a set of paths in the 3D world (called Splines).
Due to its continuous nature DES can also run much faster-than-real-time - allowing you to use it turn your material handling setup directly into a throughput simulation, or even extend it to help validate order planning.
Field for Accurate Contact Testing (FACT)
Alternatively, when working to validate models that control your real-time material handling you will want to make use of ‘Field for Accurate Contact Testing’ (FACT) regions. FACT is designed to work in tandem with the Unity Physics System - and offers you the ability to ‘exclude’ a region in your scene from that engine to run calculations in more detail, or track and export physical motion in detail in said region.
[Note : FACT is currently still in Pre-Alpha, and only open for testing in internal Prespective Projects, eta. for Alpha release is May 2021]
Ghost Rider Testing (GRT)
[Section will be appended at a later time]