INOSIM Foresight: Boosting Your Production With Predictive Batch Decision Support

INOSIM has been an essential tool for high-tech engineering applications using highly accurate Digital Twins for a long time. With INOSIM Foresight, we are harnessing the power of INOSIM simulations to provide predictive decision support of unparalleled quality and accuracy to batch plant stakeholders, be it operators, maintenance personnel, or management.

Focused Development Push

With a focused development push that involved all members of the quickly growing INOSIM family as well as many industrial partners, we have made large strides towards the commercial availability of INOSIM Foresight. Our customizable INOSIM Workflow Controller component lets us run Foresight tool chains and INOSIM Foresight simulations robustly in server environments. The scalable Foresight Data Integrator component lets us connect to a variety of plant IT and OT systems to import any data that we need for the initialization of the INOSIM Foresight model, e.g., from the PI system of our partner OSIsoft, but also from MES systems and SQL databases, with more connectors to come. Our business intelligence (BICON) connector lets us export INOSIM simulation results to Tableau Dashboards in real time that provide intuitive decision support for all batch plant stakeholders via web screens or mobile devices. And these components will also be useful for INOSIM engineering projects, e.g., to create convincing visualizations for management presentations in Tableau or to automatically parametrize INOSIM models from engineering databases before simulation.

Last but not least, our standard software INOSIM’s upcoming version (V13) will deliver new features that are crucial for INOSIM Foresight deployments in productive environments, such as the new core license for unattended (and later parallelized) simulation.

First Commercial Deployments

We are currently cooperating with several large companies to develop and deploy INOSIM Foresight solutions into commercial operation. BASF is already using INOSIM simulations that connect to Osisoft PI with the Foresight data integrator to provide decision support in practice, and we are hard at work with CSL Behring and Bayer to develop the INOSIM Foresight system, with practical deployments and demonstrations planned within the next months. And many more partners are already testing our new software components.

More Revolutions in Sight

Our current research efforts also focus on Foresight: Within the scope of the KEEN Innovation Platform, we are cooperating with Merck on the development and real-world deployment of an INOSIM Foresight system that is “enriched” with AI components for batch plant optimization. And the advanced scheduling solution that we are currently building within the OptiProd.NRW project will be a natural extension of any INOSIM Foresight deployment and will provide unprecedented gains in productivity and resource efficiency.

Dr. Christian Sonntag, head of innovation at INOSIM and INOSIM Foresight project lead, is very happy about the progress: “INOSIM Foresight relies on a variety of components that need to interact seamlessly, and all of these puzzle pieces are coming together nicely. First prototypes are already in operation, or will be deployed soon. In 2021, we will drive INOSIM Foresight to maturity so that you can reap its benefits as well.“

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