Nowadays, travelers expect a comfortable and efficient travel experience, and a missed flight can ruin a good trip or an important business negotiation. Therefore, airport operators need to improve airport processing efficiency to meet the growing demand for passenger traffic.

Among them, security and baggage handling are important links in airport operations, and it is obvious that a more automated and intelligent baggage detection process can ensure a good experience for passengers.

In order to provide customers with future-oriented products and solutions, Vanderlander and Schneider Electric are using digital twins to “transform reality into reality” and help passengers experience efficient travel.

“Time is money”

KJ2004X1-BA1 Crack the “trouble” of traditional production line development

Founded in 1949, the Dutch company Vanderlande is a global leader in future warehousing systems, airport baggage handling automation and express sorting automation solutions, and its market-leading baggage handling systems handle more than 4 billion bags a year worldwide – they are active at more than 600 airports. Including 12 of the world’s top 20 airports.

Airports are important infrastructure for air transport and urban development, and the construction process is usually a huge investment, which can cost tens of billions. So for airport builders and operators, time means money.

Due to the different internal structure and pattern, customers at each airport have customized requirements for baggage detection lines. According to the traditional model, when Van der Lande deployers new projects, including baggage detection lines, it is necessary to build a set of physical lines in the factory for the equipment that will be delivered to the customer in the future, in order to verify the various situations that may occur in advance, but the problems caused by this are also obvious:

Physical lines are expensive

Combined with raw materials and labor costs, a set of physical lines may cost up to one million yuan, and customized needs for different airport customers require repeated costs.

KJ2004X1-BA1 Longer period

The traditional production line development must wait until the completion of the physical line construction before PLC debugging, which often leads to the commissioning work in the late stage of the project, and the project delivery on time is under great pressure.

Poor flexibility

On the one hand, the video and animation scripts in the traditional pre-sales program have long been fixed, and the end user cannot freely adjust the viewing Angle and details; On the other hand, the overall effect of the project can only be seen after the completion of the physical production line, and the cost of modification or optimization is too high.

“Transform the real into the virtual”

Digital subversion research and development, debugging, operation and maintenance of the whole process

The establishment of physical production lines will bring many challenges such as cost, efficiency and flexibility, and digital technology is like the magic of “turning the real into the virtual”, which can subvert the entire process of research and development, commissioning and operation and maintenance.

 

 

 

Based on Schneider Electric’s EcoStruxure Machine Expert Twin (EMET) software, Van der Lande was able to build digital twins of automated baggage detection lines in a virtual world that operate exactly as the real line.

 

R&d stage

The EMET software turns the traditional “waterfall” physical hardware development process into an “agile” development process, that is, the virtual inspection line is built at the beginning of the design of the baggage inspection line at Vanderlande Airport, and the physical simulation of the PLC is carried out during the construction process to continuously optimize the design.

Debugging phase

Since there is no need to wait for the physical prototype, the debugging engineer can purchase the hardware of the physical line according to the results of the virtual debugging of the software, so as to ensure the final code quality and the timely delivery of the project. Compared with the traditional mode, the field commissioning time and cost of the new mode are reduced by 50%.

Late operation and maintenance stage

Customers also continue to benefit from:

EMET software can be used for remote training of employees by customers;

In the operation and maintenance stage as a line monitoring software to help predictive maintenance;

Maintenance engineers can perform remote operations without having to be physically present in some cases.

In addition to reducing costs and increasing efficiency, EMET software has helped transform Van der Lande’s business model.

 

For example, in the traditional pre-sale model, because users cannot see the physical production line, they may have many questions about the efficiency and functionality of the product. Today, with EMET, Vanderlander’s pre-sales engineers can quickly build project scenarios and display them for users in a full range, reducing the learning cost of end users, improving the order rate, and subverting the pre-sales business model.

 

During the development of the automated Baggage inspection Line at Vanderlande Airport, Schneider Electric provided a complete hardware and software solution covering the EcoStruxure™ three-tier architecture, which helped us reduce project costs, accelerate product delivery, replace physical sample lines with virtual inspection production lines, and transform our business model. With the gradual accumulation of the number of models in the model library, we can eventually replace the verification effect of the physical airport inspection line through virtual means in the future, and reduce the cost of materials, personnel and time as much as possible. If the replacement verification of the physical line is feasible, hundreds of thousands of material costs can be saved in a single time.