Long-standing software partnership

Siemens, a lead­ing sup­pli­er in the field of automa­tion and indus­tri­al soft­ware, coop­er­ates with Nis­san to build pro­duc­tion lines for the new all-elec­tric crossover Nis­san Ariya at the company’s plant in Tochi­gi, Japan. Both com­pa­nies build on their long-stand­ing coop­er­a­tion. Nis­san had already been using the Siemens Dig­i­tal Indus­tries soft­ware port­fo­lio to opti­mize design and pro­duc­tion. End-to-end dig­i­tal threads enable Nis­san to con­nect a wide vari­ety of sources of infor­ma­tion across prod­uct life­cy­cle man­age­ment (PLM) platforms.

“The suc­cess­ful launch of the new pro­duc­tion lines is a mile­stone in the col­lab­o­ra­tion of the two com­pa­nies,” says Cedrik Neike, Mem­ber of the Man­ag­ing Board of Siemens and CEO Dig­i­tal Indus­tries. “Cli­mate change and strin­gent envi­ron­men­tal reg­u­la­tions are pow­er­ful dri­vers for the devel­op­ment of elec­tri­fied pow­er­trains. We will bring in all of our cut­ting-edge tech­nolo­gies to this col­lab­o­ra­tion to enable a high­ly flex­i­ble, effi­cient and sus­tain­able auto­mo­tive production.”

“At our Nis­san Intel­li­gent Fac­to­ry in Tochi­gi, we are build­ing the future of mobil­i­ty. It enables us to not only improve the work envi­ron­ment but also to real­ize a zero-emis­sion pro­duc­tion sys­tem. To dig­i­tal­ize our new elec­tric vehi­cle pro­duc­tion line, we chose to work with Siemens, our inno­va­tion part­ner and one of the lead­ing com­pa­nies in indus­tri­al automa­tion and dig­i­tal­iza­tion, because they have the nec­es­sary exper­tise in this area,” says Tei­ji Hira­ta, Cor­po­rate vice pres­i­dent, Vehi­cle Pro­duc­tion Engi­neer­ing and Devel­op­ment Divi­sion at Nis­san Motor.

The sys­tem archi­tec­ture of Nis­san’s new­ly devel­oped elec­tric pow­er­train aims to stan­dard­ize the pro­cess­ing and assem­bly of the pow­er­train. It includes Siemens’ safe­ty PLC Simat­ic S7-1500, ET200SP dis­trib­uted I/ O mod­ule as Siemens One Sin­gle Solu­tion (OSS). Profinet cre­ates end-to-end com­mu­ni­ca­tion from the field to the man­age­ment lev­el, and the engi­neer­ing frame­work TIA Por­tal has also ful­ly inte­grat­ed all automa­tion devices. This enables com­plete access to the entire dig­i­tal­ized automa­tion process, from dig­i­tal plan­ning to inte­grat­ed engi­neer­ing and trans­par­ent oper­a­tion. More intel­li­gent auto­mo­biles require more and high-per­form­ing Elec­tron­ic Con­trol Units (ECUs) in the vehi­cle – as is the case in the new Nis­san Ariya. The Siemens diag­nos­tic com­mis­sion­ing sys­tem Sidis Pro, which has already been deployed in many auto­mo­bile com­pa­nies around the world, is imple­ment­ed at Nissan’s new pro­duc­tion line for data writ­ing into ECU and ver­i­fy­ing auto­mo­tive elec­tric com­po­nents. Sidis Pro is the advanced vehi­cle diag­no­sis and inspec­tion data man­age­ment sys­tem that pro­vides opti­mal sup­port for inspec­tion process­es to enable qual­i­ty of car pro­duc­tion. Sidis Pro man­ages a wide range of data with serv­er func­tions, con­tribut­ing to the dig­i­ti­za­tion of pro­duc­tion lines. It enables max­i­mum flex­i­bil­i­ty in auto­mo­tive pro­duc­tion as it is eas­i­ly mod­i­fi­able depends on the pro­duc­tion plan, and the changes can be adapt­ed quick­ly. The same soft­ware can be used for dif­fer­ent appli­ca­tions, enabling sys­tem stan­dard­iza­tion and ensur­ing that few­er resources per­form for more tasks even at oth­er pro­duc­tion sites.

Siemens con­tin­ues to sup­port Nis­san in dig­i­tal­iz­ing and elec­tri­fy­ing the pro­duc­tion facil­i­ties and con­tribute to the real­iza­tion of Nis­san Intel­li­gent Fac­to­ry vision.