PROSTEP showed its colours at shipbuilding and plant engineering industry events

Every two years, the Royal Institution of Naval Architects (RINA) hosts the International Conference on Computer Applications in Shipbuilding (ICCAS). The 20th conference was held in Yokohama, Japan, following a year's delay due to the coronavirus pandemic. Representatives from shipyards, universities and software vendors gathered for the three-day event, started by a keynote by Abe Akinori from the Japanese Maritime Research Institute. Akinori stressed the importance of implementing PLM concepts, not only to improve current processes but also as a means of preserving a company’s know-how. He sees digitalization as a key to superior offerings, improved quality and cost savings and thus keeping the Japanese shipbuilding industry competitive on the global market.

Numerous CAx and PLM vendors presented their solutions in Japan, including CADMATIC, Dassault Systèmes, NAPA, Siemens Digital Industries Software and SSI. Our Hamburg shipbuilding experts took advantage of the event to meet with representatives from shipyards around the world and present our portfolio. Attending the conference led to numerous conversations that would otherwise have been difficult to have with persons from Asia and America. Our integration offerings in the field of digitalization backed by customer references from Europe and Asia were generating a great deal of interest.

We delivered several presentations, among other things about our concepts for integrating shipbuilding software solutions or on the ProProS project. In this joint research project with the Fr. Lürssen shipyard and RWTH Aachen University, we are developing a tool for end-to-end digitalization in production planning to rapidly detect disruptions, determine their impact and create planning alternatives. In Japan, we also presented our 3DigitalTwin offering for the AI-based reverse engineering of CAD models from 3D scans.

Digitalization of existing plants

3DigitalTwin is not only applicable in the shipbuilding industry, it was originally designed for plant engineering. Many plant operators are faced with the challenge to create digital twins of their existing plants so that they can, for example, plan maintenance measures or make changes to plants more efficiently. 

The manual remodelling of the plants, involves immense amounts of time and money, something the 3DigitalTwin software can reduce drastically.

At ACHEMA 2022, the world's leading trade show for the process industry, we presented 3DigitalTwin the first time to an international audience. Here we shared a booth with Schuller & Company, who were already our partner during the implementation phase. Later we also presented the solution at the DACH U(n)ser Meeting powered by Schuller & Company, the meeting of the AVEVA community in the German-speaking region. In a well-attended presentation, we explained how we use AI to segment the point clouds from 3D scans and convert them into 3D models, and what benefits this offers in daily work.

Our unique approach to create models from 3D scan data is generating a great deal of interest from both plant operators and engineering companies, who often assume responsibility for the manual digitalization of existing plants. At ACHEMA, we established interesting contacts with international refineries, pharmaceutical companies and chemical plant operators, who are interested in the fast and cost-effective digitalization of their existing plants. We took advantage of this opportunity to also present our migration and integration solutions. Our service for simplifying model data also struck a chord. It allows model data from suppliers to be integrated into the plant model in a simplified form and with a small volume of data.