EKS InTec

Virtual commissioning and digital shadows

One of the multitude of ICT companies in Germany operating in the field of software innovation and embodying many of the aspects referred to by Dr Herbert Zeisel, EKS InTec GmbH, is based in Weingarten. It is a partner for the development, design and software as well as virtual commissioning of simple to complex production plants and special machines for the mobility industry and its system partners. Its range of services cover the whole spectrum from process planning, through the design of stations and complete production systems for body manufacturing to the simulation and optimisation of production processes. Dr Anton Strahilov is Head of Research and responsible for the R&D effort and the coordination of projects.

"2014 was an important year for our company. Until then, we had gone by the name Rücker EKS GmbH," Anton explains, "but then FFT Produktionssysteme GmbH bought a 100% shareholding in the company and for the past three years we have been known by our present name EKS InTec. But our foundation goes back to 1994 when the company began with a focus on the engineering of production equipment and systems." Later a separate division was started to create a software application suite to simulate production systems, specifically with the goal of realising the virtual commissioning of entire production plants.

From INVISION to RF::Suite

"This new division was responsible for creating an innovative simulation system, INVISION, that allows the planning and visualisation of production operations in real-time simulation. As a sequel to this simulation software package, we developed our RF::Suite," Anton continues, "which is a software family that contains a number of different tools that take a step further the specific functions developed in the INVISION tool, like translating the specific manufacturer’s robot programs into a unified language and enabling the simultaneous processing of the kinematics and the I/O signal processing. RF::Suite allows innovative planning, analysis and predictive maintenance of real plants, acting as a digital shadow. You can see it, therefore, as both an extension of the earlier tool and extendible, too. We are now able to represent the complete digital development process. And this has proved very successful to date. These two tools played a role in the success of the ITEA AVANTI project."

Family of tools

EKS InTec is one of the very few suppliers of such kinds of virtual commissioning tools, and certainly the leading organisation in Germany in this respect. "What makes us unique," Anton says, "is our tool family, which is made up of several separate tools that you can use standalone or extend, depending on the requirements of the system. And the other unique aspects is our speed of response to customer needs. We operate with very rapid turnaround times. We can create a function for and with our customers that they can then use in their version within just a month. We are strongly geared to the automotive sector. In fact, we work exclusively in this area where our customers have a real need to optimise their production. So they need a digital twin of their actual production system. That is, running in parallel. Our software, therefore has to be able to ensure that they can do this. Therefore, innovating the software is a key feature of our work. We constantly have to improve our software, extend it, to change functionalities so that we keep pace with changing customer needs."