How Siemens builds the industrial metaverse around the digital twin: Xcelerator, Teamcenter X, Simcenter and the factories in Erlangen and Nanjing that prove the model.
Siemens Prime
A global powerhouse in industrial automation, software and infrastructure, Siemens is a key architect of the industrial metaverse, collaborating closely with partners like NVIDIA to merge the physical and digital worlds. Unlike the consumer metaverse, Siemens focuses on a virtual world designed to solve complex, real-world industrial problems. Its strategy centers on providing the software and expertise businesses need to accelerate their digital transformation, using a comprehensive portfolio of technologies anchored by the digital twin.
Metaverse Products
- Siemens Xcelerator: Siemens' open digital business platform, a foundational ecosystem that provides a curated portfolio of software and services for digital transformation. It is the bridge that connects the physical and digital worlds, paving the way for the industrial metaverse.
- Comprehensive Digital Twin: A multi-domain digital representation of a physical asset, product or process that evolves over its entire lifecycle. It is used to design, simulate, optimize and test systems virtually before making changes in the real world.
- Siemens Electronics Factory Erlangen (Germany): A prime example of a sustainable Digital Enterprise. A comprehensive digital twin integrates real-time production data to analyze and optimize material flows, reduce energy consumption and boost productivity. The factory uses its industrial metaverse to analyze a robot's historical data visually, troubleshoot issues and redesign production areas virtually before any physical change, contributing to a 50% reduction in carbon footprint and a 60% increase in product quality.
- Siemens Digital Native Factory Nanjing (China): Built from the ground up as a "digital native" plant, with a digital twin created and simulated before the first concrete was poured. Virtual planning avoided costly errors, such as a painting machine without proper ventilation. The twin now runs in daily operations through a constant feedback loop between production and simulation, contributing to a 200% increase in manufacturing capacity and a 20% boost in productivity.
- Teamcenter X: Cloud-based Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) software, part of the Siemens Xcelerator portfolio. It enables real-time collaboration on, and visualization of, photorealistic, physics-based digital twins.
- Simcenter: Combines system simulation, 3D computer-aided engineering (CAE) and testing to help businesses optimize designs and deliver innovations faster and with greater confidence.
- NX Immersive Explorer: An add-on module for NX CAD to review CAD data in an immersive, interactive VR or desktop experience. It supports most VR headsets through OpenXR.
- MindSphere: Siemens' industrial IoT as a service. While not a metaverse platform itself, it supplies the real-time operational data that keeps digital twins "live", enabling predictive maintenance and optimization.
- COMOS Walkinside: A virtual reality platform for Asset Lifecycle Management (ALM) that lets users "walk through" entire plants, including in VR, for realistic training, maintenance planning and safety assessments.
Metaverse Applications
- Industrial Digital Twin Development: Full digital twins of factories, production lines and products for real-time monitoring, predictive maintenance and operational efficiency over the asset's life cycle.
- Automotive Simulation: Partnering with companies like BMW to accelerate transient aerodynamics simulations for entire vehicle geometries, reducing time, cost and energy consumption.
- Factory Planning and Optimization: Designing and validating factory layouts and processes virtually before a single machine is moved.
- Robotics and Automation: A 1:1 simulation of a real robot's movements to analyze historical data, troubleshoot issues and identify optimizations.
- Collaborative Engineering: Globally distributed teams working on complex designs in one shared virtual space, powered by the connection between Siemens Xcelerator and NVIDIA Omniverse.
- Immersive Design Reviews: NX Immersive Explorer and Teamcenter Digital Reality Viewer for high-fidelity VR reviews that reduce the need for physical prototypes.
- Sustainable Aviation Development: At CES 2025, Siemens showed how Xcelerator enables aviation startup JetZero to develop a blended-wing aircraft, using digital twins of the aircraft and its manufacturing to target a 50% reduction in fuel consumption and zero carbon emissions by 2035.
Examples of Siemens Product Enabled Use Cases
- Manufacturing Efficiency: A factory digital twin increased manufacturing capacity by 200% and productivity by 20% at Siemens Nanjing.
- Sustainable Design and Operations: "What if" scenarios optimize resource use and cut waste and carbon during design, where 80% of environmental impacts are determined.
- Error-Free Production Redesigns: 3D models and simulation confirm a redesigned production area works as planned before anything physical changes.
- Shipbuilding: With HD Hyundai, massive engineering datasets for complex ships are unified in a real-time, photorealistic digital twin, saving time and reducing errors.
Presented by Hkdolts at the Metaverse Standards Forum Use Case Task Force, 7 August 2025. Figures are as reported at the time.