Siemens 2014 Annual Report Download - page 70

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Energy application
Entering uncharted territory For the Hamad Inter-
national Airport project, engineers working at computers
in Böblingen, Germany, pushed fully loaded flight-service
carts onto waiting trolleys, transported them to the supply
station, unloaded them, cleaned them in the designated area
and then conveyed them to the appropriate terminals –
all in a virtual environment and up to , times a day.
“ The programmers had to foresee every scenario with the
potential to cause problems,” says Monika Schneider – for
example, when a trolley fails to reach its station or the stor-
age area for empty trolleys is too small. “ When we used the
real electrified monorail system for the first time, everything
worked just as we’d planned in the virtual world.”