How SpiraTec is redefining manufacturing with open commissioning and collaborative innovation

Authors: Michael Kasseckert (Team and account manager) ,Viktor Gaponenko, (Senior professional engineer), and Moritz Langer (Professional engineer).

SpiraTec Group is a global player in industrial engineering and solutions in the process industry, specializing in digital transformation, engineering, robotics, automation, and industrial IT. SpiraTec’s expertise in virtual commissioning helps manufacturers optimize processes, cut costs, and accelerate digitalization across the globe.

In this article, discover how SpiraTec are helping customers address key industry challenges and the journey behind ‘Open Commissioning’ – an open source initiative built on Unity that aims to create a truly collaborative and accessible solution for virtual commissioning.

As industries accelerate their digital transformation, manufacturers face increasing pressure to bring products to market faster, reduce costs, and meet sustainability goals – all the while struggling with fragmented data, outdated methodologies, and limited standardization. These challenges demand smarter, more integrated solutions — and this is where digital twins and virtual commissioning come into play.

The global digital twin market is seeing a surge in demand: valued at $17.73 billion in 2024, it is projected to grow from $24.48 billion in 2025 to $259.32 billion in 2032. According to the Capgemini Research Institute’s digital twins report, 57% of organizations cite sustainability as a key driver for digital twin investments, with 51% expecting these technologies to help them meet environmental goals.

Virtual commissioning— a key application of digital twin technology — is a game-changer for digitalization, enabling manufacturers to simulate and optimize processes prior to real-world deployment, thereby reducing resource consumption and reducing costs.

Understanding virtual commissioning

Traditionally, commissioning in automation refers to the process of bringing a new system (device, machine, plant etc.) to a fully operational, production-ready state. In the past, this meant that most PLC (Programmable Logic Controller) programming and system testing required the physical hardware to be in place, often resulting in costly delays and last-minute troubleshooting.

Virtual commissioning reverses this paradigm and replicates the entire commissioning process in a digital environment. Instead of communicating with real devices, sensors, and actuators, the PLC communicates with a digital twin – an emulated model that accurately mirrors the behavior of the real system. Crucially, the same PLC program code is used for both the virtual and physical stages, ensuring a seamless handover with no need for code modifications or last-minute rewrites once the physical hardware is available.

How virtual commissioning delivers real-world value

Efficiency Gains Virtual commissioning significantly reduces on-site testing and the need for physical prototypes, resulting in significant time and cost savings. It also accelerates development cycles by allowing teams to iterate rapidly in a digital environment, reducing time to market.

Risk reduction By detecting errors early through simulations, virtual commissioning reduces the risk of costly mistakes. Moreover, it supports safer deployments by allowing teams to digitally simulate hazardous tasks, eliminating potential risks before physical implementation.

Collaboration and innovation Realistic simulations foster better alignment among cross-functional teams. By visualizing and interacting with systems in a virtual space, stakeholders gain deeper insights and enhance overall communication, spurring creativity, and innovation.

From constraints to capabilities: Our shift to Unity

At SpiraTec, we've always been driven by a single goal: to help our customers seamlessly integrate virtual commissioning into their operations. We were faced with closed systems with limited extensibility, small user communities, and minimal application programming interfaces (APIs) — conditions that fostered vendor lock-in and increased project risks.

Instead of enabling us to innovate, these limitations often slowed us down and left our customers without the accessible and scalable solutions they needed.

Enter Unity, the real-time 3D engine that became the key to overcoming our biggest hurdles. By unlocking the power of Unity's editor, we not only gained state-of-the-art physics and rendering capabilities, but also fundamentally transformed our entire approach to digital twin model development.

The following technologies and features within Unity helped us solve several problems and shaped our digital twin development process:

• Prefab system: Enables us to take an object-oriented approach to digital twin creation that utilizes a reusable library of components. This greatly accelerates development while maintaining consistent quality across different projects.
• Pixyz: Allows us to seamlessly import Computer-Aided Design Data (CAD) data and set up a rules-based workflow to create digital twins based on specific metadata and customer standards.
• User interface (UI) Toolkit: Enables the creation and enhancement of UI content for the editor and runtime, providing a smoother user experience for custom tools and interfaces.
• Job System: A real step forward for us, enabling efficient multi-threaded simulations of complex processes – such as fluid flow, bulk material movement, and stress modeling – and large-scale digital twin projects.

Analyzer & Storage Profiler: Provided detailed insights into performance bottlenecks, allowing us to optimize and improve project quality prior to deployment, ultimately delivering more reliable solutions to our customers.

Inside a large-scale digital twin: Warehouse commissioning reimagined

We are proud to showcase a real-world success story featuring a leading logistics company's warehouse simulation, where we integrated 12 virtual PLCs into a fully digital environment. The model featured fieldbus emulation and simulation of industrial components such as drives, safety modules, and RFID readers. To enhance usability, a custom user interface was developed, delivering a lightweight and powerful standalone .exe application optimized for large-scale simulations.

Additionally, the system was seamlessly integrated with the warehouse management system (WMS), enabling native telegram communication for real-time product data management in a secure virtual environment. This ensured comprehensive software validation before the physical machine even existed, significantly improving quality and reducing deployment risk.

This initiative reduced their commissioning time by 30%, significantly accelerating project schedules while reducing costs and risks. Beyond efficiency gains, it also enhanced cross-departmental collaboration, enabling cost-effective iterative development and faster proof-of-concept validation.

Beyond Efficiency: Driving sustainability through simulation

The conversation around virtual commissioning often focuses on reduced commissioning times and improved collaboration – but these benefits also translate directly into tangible business value, especially when it comes to sustainability.

We've already started collaborating with customers to expand the use of digital twins throughout subsequent product lifecycles, and the potential for accelerating sustainability and cost savings is immense. By streamlining processes and leveraging high-fidelity simulations, companies can:

• Extend equipment lifespan: Using predictive maintenance algorithms trained on simulated data, organizations minimize wear and tear, deferring costly replacements and repairs. Fewer breakdowns directly lower maintenance costs and reduce unplanned downtime.
• Reduce resource consumption: By validating control logic and workflows in a virtual environment, teams can identify efficiency gaps that lead to reduced energy use and minimized material waste. These improvements not only help meet environmental goals, but also reduce operating costs.
• Accelerate time-to-market: Virtual commissioning minimizes the need for physical prototypes and lengthy on-site testing. As a result, companies can launch products faster, capture market share sooner, and realize a faster return on R&D investments.

Reduced on-site footprint: Fewer troubleshooting visits and shorter installation times reduce travel-related emissions and expenses. This benefit scales significantly for organizations with multiple global facilities.

Shaping the future together: A community-driven initiative

Collaboration and openness will drive virtual commissioning's greatest breakthroughs as it continues to evolve. With Open Commissioning, we're not just sharing tools, we're building a community-driven ecosystem where innovative ideas can be refined, tested, and applied to solve real-world challenges.

The most exciting developments are yet to come. Our next evolution involves integrating generative AI and real-time cloud simulation, establishing data standards, and expanding industrial connectivity. Explore the progress on GitHub and be part of the innovation.

The future of manufacturing is collaborative, data-driven, and green. We invite you to join us on this journey, and together we'll create a smarter, more sustainable industrial landscape.

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