Virtual commissioning for packaging lines
A packaging line is a string of machines from different builders, and they first meet each other on your floor. We arrive with the PLC code, the sequences and the safety logic already validated against a twin of the machine.
A packaging line is not one machine. It is a chain of handshakes.
A packaging line runs a dozen machines from half a dozen builders, and the joints between them are tested last. Every machine can be correct while the line starves or blocks. Changeover runs on the same joints and costs more line time than breakdowns. The control logic decides how long the plant stands still.
INE, through MAPA's annual report on the Spanish food industry: food and drink is the largest manufacturing branch of Spanish industry, with a turnover of €178,923.3M, 25.7% of Spanish manufacturing, across 27,896 companies, 96.1% of which have fewer than 50 employees. RBX works in that market.
Here, "digital twin" means one specific thing.
Our record is automotive; food and beverage gets the method: the control layer, proven against a model of the machine before the machine exists, from the filler to the pallet. Mind two words. Here "digital twin" can mean anything from line speed to product physics; ours only means that model. And "validation" here means cleaning and critical limits; we validate controller code.
Every stretch of the line fails in its own way.
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Filling and bottling
Fillers, cappers and labellers run in step with the conveyor, and one missed handshake starves the whole train. Sequences, interlocks and stops under load have already run before the machine reaches your floor.
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Primary packaging
Flowpack, thermoforming and tray sealing chase a product that never arrives quite the same twice. The control logic runs in the model at the machine's real rate, not at demo speed.
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End of line
Case packers, cartoners, wrappers, palletising: the closest stretch to an automotive cell, and it gets the automotive treatment. Paths collision-free and safety settled before anything is bolted down.
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Format changeover and cleaning
A changeover loses its hour in the restart, not in the recipe change. The full sequence has already run: recipe, auxiliary axes, clean-in-place and the recovery after a stop.
Proving the control before installation is already this sector's practice.
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The sector's largest builder buys software for our layer
machineering quotes Krones' Head of Simulation, Packaging Technology, by name, endorsing its iPhysics tool for "precise verification of PLC programming". The world's largest filler builder staffs simulation as a job title.
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The tools for our layer are sold into food and beverage
Siemens sells virtual commissioning for food and beverage machinery on a direct promise: turn the machine on before it exists. We are not importing this from automotive; it is already sold here.
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The sector's flagship trade fair publishes on it
drinktec, the sector's flagship trade fair, publishes editorial on virtual commissioning among its industry insights. The term is already in this sector's conversation.
Academic work exists in the sector and in Spanish: the University of the Basque Country holds the projects "Modelado y puesta en marcha virtual del gemelo digital de una máquina Flowpack con la herramienta MELSOFT Gemini" and "Gemelo digital y puesta en marcha virtual de máquina empaquetadora", which verify controller code by software-in-the-loop simulation on food packaging machines. Peer-reviewed work on the subject also exists, such as "Disturbance Simulation in the Packaging Process of Confectionary Using Virtual Commissioning" (Machines, doi:10.3390/machines8020019); we cite its title, not its findings.
When we leave, the control stays with you.
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The code is left documented and written one way
A packaging line comes from several builders, and each one programs to its own rules. We have delivered inside ten different OEM standards: naming, block structure, diagnostics and documentation to the programme's rules, not ours. When we leave, the control is documented and written one way, whoever maintains it.
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PLC, robot and safety, one team
The machine ships whole. Signals between PLC, robot and safety are mapped and tested together, not in two projects that first meet on the floor.
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The people who program are the people who start it up
The same team that proved the line against its twin is on site through the FAT and the start-up. No handover, no explaining the line twice. The joints are no longer tested last.
Our expertise is automotive: ten OEM standards delivered, among them VASS5 and VASS6, BMW and Daimler Integra Wave 6, with more than 400 validated PLC architectures and more than 1,000 robots programmed.