A digital factory platform for the design of roll shop plants

Replying to requests for quotation in a fast and effective way is a key need for technology providers, in particular machine tool builders and system integrators. Digital factory technologies provide the opportunity of speeding up the generation of technical offers through the development of a digital twin of the system under study, thus enabling the assessment of different candidate configurations and the associated performance. In this paper we present a set of integrated digital tools to support the design of roll shop plants, i.e. plants dedicated to grinding cylinders for rolling mills. These digital tools are aimed to engineers and provide a configuration workflow, a 3D environment and performance evaluation tools. The interoperability among the software modules and the reuse of knowledge is enhanced by semantic web technologies and the definition of a common data model as an ontology relying on technical standards.