Game simulation boosts manufacturing with SAS

Can a combination of video game simulation and analytics from SAS Institute Inc. help transform critical processes in the manufacturing industry? A pilot project at one of the world’s leading manufacturers of paper and wood-based building products offers promising results that this might be the case.

SAS’ William Collins and Paul Gain, along with Georgia-Pacific’s Roshan Shah, talk with theCUBE about how their initiative helps strengthen manufacturing efficiency and safety.

A joint effort involving SAS, Epic Games Inc., and Georgia-Pacific LLC is driving a project using artificial intelligence, data and game visualization to optimize manufacturing. The goal is to create a realistic game simulation of factory operations to enable decision-making and boost output.

“We’ve been around for a bit, and we’ve got quite a bit of data that we can leverage to do data science machine learning on,” said Roshan Shah (pictured, right), vice president for AI and products at Georgia-Pacific. “We’re really looking at this to help us generate more synthetic data such that we can train those models, and that’s a game-changer. It’s a pretty big opportunity for us to be able to leverage that, and that’s what we’re piloting.”

Shah spoke with theCUBE’s Rebecca Knight at SAS Innovate, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. He was joined by William Collis (left), Head of Games at SAS, and Paul Gavin (center), Head of Games Analytics at SAS, and they discussed how the joint initiative can strengthen manufacturing efficiency and safety. (* Disclosure below.)

Game simulation details environments

The pilot project initially focused on operations at Georgia-Pacific’s Savannah River Mill facility in Rincon, Georgia, which manufactures various paper products. The manufacturer leveraged SAS’ technology to optimize the use of automated guided vehicles, or AGVs, as they navigated a bustling factory floor, according to Gavin.

“In this simulated environment, you can show how, for example, traffic patterns slow things down when AGVs get too close to each other, or if someone walks around in front of one,” he said. “They have to slow down for safety, it makes them delayed on their route, they don’t deliver the goods fast enough, and it backs up the whole system.”

SAS’ advanced analytics and Epic Games’ Unreal Engine technology helped create realistic simulations through the use of digital twins. A digital twin can accurately replicate a real-world environment, allowing users to troubleshoot obstacles and test solutions, Collis noted.

“Digital twins are just so powerful and encompassing,” he explained. “It just makes managing and acting in a plant or manufacturing setting you’ve deployed a digital twin in more intuitive. You’re literally seeing representations of what is actually happening in the plant right in front of your screen. That just makes it much easier to identify, diagnose and solve problems.”

Along with improvements in manufacturing efficiency, the project also offers the potential to improve workplace safety. Simulated situations involving AGVs can help identify and fix safety issues before they occur in the real world, according to Shah.

“If we can partner and use this capability to solve a problem for us, that makes it safer,” he noted. “If the pure application of this technology gives anybody in manufacturing an advantage in making the workplace safer, candidly, I don’t know that we need more reason than that to kind of go after it.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of SAS Innovate:

(* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for SAS Innovate. Neither SAS Institute Inc., the sponsor of theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE