BMW is expanding its use of the Nvidia Omniverse platform for building and operating industrial metaverse applications across its international production network, including the planned electric vehicle plant in Debrecen, Hungary, which is due to start operations in 2025.
“We are excited and incredibly proud of the progress BMW has made with Omniverse,” said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of Nvidia. “The partnership will continue to push the frontiers of virtual integration and virtual tooling for the next generation of smart-connected factories around the world.”
The news was announced during Huang’s GTC developer conference keynote, where he was joined by Milan Nedeljković, a member of BMW Group’s board of management, to officially open BMW’s first entirely virtual factory powered by Nvidia Omniverse.
Omniverse enables manufacturing companies to plan and optimize multibillion-dollar factory projects entirely virtually, resulting in faster and more efficient production processes, delivering benefits such as improved time-to-market, enhanced digitalization and increased sustainability.
The keynote demo highlighted a virtual planning session for the German OEM’s Debrecen EV plant. Using Omniverse, BMW’s team can aggregate data into large, high-performance models while connecting their domain-specific software tools and enabling multi-user live collaboration from any location. By beginning work in this virtual factory, the OEM can ensure that the facility will work as intended with the utmost efficiency.
During the EV factory demo, Nedeljković invites Huang into an update in which the BMW team seeks to include a robot in a small area. The team solves the problem collaboratively, with logistics and production planners able to visualize the robot before choosing a location.
To date, change orders and flow re-optimizations at existing facilities are extremely expensive and also cause manufacturing downtime. The ability to pre-optimize eliminates nearly all of these costs.
With Omniverse, BMW can bridge existing software and data repositories from industrial computer-aided design and engineering tools such as Siemens Process Simulate, Autodesk Revit and Bentley Systems MicroStation.