PepsiCo has partnered with Siemens and Nvidia to leverage digital twin technology and artificial intelligence (AI) to enhance the efficiency and speed of its packaging and bottling lines. The collaboration aims to create a digital model of physical objects, combining 2D and 3D data to identify bottlenecks and optimize packaging operations. The partnership is already underway in the US, with early pilots showing promising results.
According to John Nixon, Vice President at Siemens Digital Industries Software, the collaboration demonstrates the potential of industry-wide cooperation, enabling manufacturers, technology partners, and original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) to work together to drive innovation. Nixon highlights the importance of digital twins in reducing waste, optimizing sustainability metrics, and improving agility in packaging operations.
Tarik Hammadou, Director of Supply Chain Developer Relations at Nvidia, explains that AI helps identify bottlenecks on packaging lines by analyzing high-frequency operational data, such as machine cycle times and quality rejects. AI models learn normal behavior patterns and detect deviations in real-time, enabling predictive maintenance and corrective actions.
The Digital Twin Composer, a cornerstone solution developed by Siemens, allows packaging and bottling teams to create living, dynamic digital twins of complex packaging lines. This enables operators, OEMs, and engineers to rapidly understand performance, test ideas, and improve flow before touching physical equipment. Nvidia’s Computer Vision, an AI tool, analyzes digital images and videos, providing a perception layer that connects physical reality to digital twins and AI decision systems.
The partnership aims to boost the speed and efficiency of packaging and bottling lines, with a focus on high-speed, high variability, and high SKU complexity. The collaboration has already shown promising results, with simulations becoming living systems capable of predicting failures, optimizing layouts and robot motions, and safely testing throughput and quality improvements before deployment on the production floor.
The conversion of existing packaging equipment into digital twins is also a key aspect of the partnership. Siemens’ Composer is designed to support retrofitting and greenfield scaling, allowing teams to start from existing engineering data and on-site scans. The message to the industry is that willingness, collaboration, and a platform built for complex brownfield environments are essential for successful adoption.
Overall, the partnership between PepsiCo, Siemens, and Nvidia has the potential to revolutionize the packaging industry, enabling companies to optimize their operations, reduce waste, and improve efficiency. With the use of digital twin technology and AI, companies can anticipate disruptions, harmonize equipment speeds, and optimize changeovers and labor allocation, resulting in higher sustained output, faster recovery from variability, and measurable throughput gains without additional capital investment.