Where automotive simulation projects pay back
Automotive manufacturing has some of the highest stakes for getting simulation right. A robot cell designed on 2D CAD and built to drawing might miss a reach window by 40mm. A PLC program tested only on paper might have a deadlock condition that only triggers under a specific sequence of sensor signals at production speed. A new model launch might reveal that the existing line's buffer sizing fails under mixed-model scheduling.
In each case, finding the problem before physical build costs a fraction of finding it after. Virtual commissioning catches PLC bugs before the machine ships to the plant. Robot simulation validates reach and cycle time before steel is cut. Production simulation identifies buffer and staffing requirements before the launch planning is locked.
The highest-value moment to start simulation is always earlier than you think. A robot cell simulation started at concept stage catches layout problems that cost nothing to fix. The same simulation started a week before machine build catches the same problems when they cost months and significant budget to resolve.
Three simulation applications for automotive
Robot & Facility Simulation
Validate reach envelopes, cycle times, and cell layout before fabrication. Identify interference paths and optimise robot positions. Generate offline programming output directly to your robot brand's controller software.
Virtual Commissioning
Run your real PLC code against a 3D virtual machine. Catch software bugs, sequence errors, and sensor logic faults before the physical machine exists. Supports Siemens, Beckhoff, and any OPC UA-compatible controller.
Production Simulation
Model full assembly line throughput, buffer sizing, and mixed-model scheduling before a new model launch or line reconfiguration. Identify where a 15-second cycle time reduction cascades into a throughput gain — and where it doesn't.
Robot & facility simulation for automotive cells
We build robot cell simulations in Visual Components using accurate kinematic models from a library of 1000+ real robots — ABB, FANUC, KUKA, Yaskawa, Universal Robots, and others. Every simulation includes:
- Full reach envelope verification for every robot in the cell against all target positions
- Cycle time analysis with realistic joint speed profiles, not theoretical maximums
- Interference and collision checking between robots, tooling, and fixtures
- Cell layout optimisation — robot position and orientation to minimise cycle time
- Offline programming (OLP) export for RobotStudio, ROBOGUIDE, or KUKA.Sim
- 3D animation for design review and customer approval presentations
The same 3D model can be extended into a virtual commissioning environment once PLC code development begins — no rebuild required.
Virtual commissioning for automotive machine builders
Virtual commissioning connects your real PLC code to a 3D simulation of the machine. The PLC reads sensor signals from the simulation and drives actuator outputs into it — exactly as it will in the real machine, but without the physical hardware existing yet.
For automotive machine builders and system integrators, this means PLC software testing can begin weeks before mechanical build is complete. Typical results: 23 software issues found pre-delivery in a recent welding cell project; physical commissioning time reduced from 6 weeks to 2.5 weeks.
We support all major connection protocols:
Production simulation for automotive lines
Automotive assembly lines are non-linear systems. Adding a parallel station to a bottleneck operation improves throughput by less than the cycle time calculation suggests, because the bottleneck moves. Removing a buffer reduces throughput more than the buffer's utilisation implies, because starvation propagates.
We model these interactions in Simio and AnyLogic, capturing:
- Mixed-model scheduling: different cycle times per variant, changeover matrices
- Station failure and MTBF: how reliability differences between stations affect line OEE
- Buffer analysis: minimum buffer sizes to decouple stations and maintain target throughput
- Shift patterns, breaks, and planned maintenance windows
- New model launch ramp-up: throughput projection across the first 12 weeks