Aucotec’s Engineering Base forms the basis for Oxea’s digital plant twins over their entire life cycle (Photo: OXEA)
Aucotec AG’s (Hanover, Germany; www.aucotec.com) Engineering Base (EB) platform will ensure the consistency of the plant and the digital image at Oxea GmbH (Monheim am Rhein, Germany; www.oxea-chemicals.com) in the future. The leading manufacturer of oxo chemicals has decided to develop and operate its plants with the data-centered, cooperative system from the first sketch to predictive maintenance. It thus forms the basis for the digital twins of Oxea’s plants over their entire life cycle.
A key specification of the plant planner, installer and operator was that modern engineering must consistently merge the diverse workflows, documents, data and changes of the various disciplines and suppliers. Duplicate work, manual data transfer and multiple storage is too time consuming. EB’s bandwidth now reduces Oxea’s multiplicity of tools and combines basic engineering with simulation support, detail engineering and operation & maintenance.
“EB’s integrative concept, the optimization of interdisciplinary workflows, the use of future-proof cloud technology and the simple, intuitive operation have convinced Oxea just as much as EB’s understanding of standards such as Dexpi or NE 150,” Aucotec board member Uwe Vogt is looking forward to working with the chemical specialist. On the Oxea side, Oliver Bülters, head of the engineering department, sees his company on the right track to Industry 4.0. “The keys to digitization for us are above all the Digital Twin, plant modeling, predictive maintenance and fully integrated, networked systems and processes. The use of EB will massively support all these issues.” He also expects process and design optimization to bring a significant reduction in engineering and operating costs. In addition, Aucotec presented the most convincing concept for data migration during the thorough system research.
Bülters refers directly to the core of the platform: the versatile data model of the plant that is always up-to-date, globally accessible and consistent for all users. “Our planners, the simulation specialists, prefabrication, assembly and ongoing operation will all access EB’s digital plant twin in the future. Paper documentation that is difficult to maintain is eliminated, as is the comparison of redundant data pots of different tools.” In addition, the individual development steps of a plant, including testing and approval processes, can be easily and permanently traced.
Since EB proved to be very customizable and open to integration into Oxea’s system landscape during the evaluation, including the integration of SAP data, Oliver Bülters says the platform is of interest for the entire group. The Marl, Amsterdam and Nanjing (China) branches are also under discussion as potential new users.