As Ali’s three-year “Rhino Smart Manufacturing” stepped onto the stage and put into production, manufacturing upgrade topics such as the Industrial Internet and Made in China 2025 have also become hot topics in the industry. As the main body of my country’s national economy, the manufacturing industry is the foundation for the development of all industries, and quietly affects economic development and people’s lives.

For many companies, there is no clear understanding of the benefits of smart manufacturing and how to upgrade the production process simply and effectively. With the global manufacturing industry facing a new round of industrial division of labor, there is not much time left for China’s manufacturing industry.

The natural complexity of manufacturing is destined to be extremely long. That’s why, in the program of “Achieving Manufacturing Transformation and Upgrading, Intelligently Changing the Future”, “Digital Transformation of Manufacturing” will become the theme of our discussion.

Why is smart manufacturing so important?

Former Harvard University professor, well-known economist, World Bank economic adviser Hollis Channery once pointed out in the book “Comparative Study of Industrialization and Economic Growth”: ” The transformation of the economic structure will accelerate the process of economic growth; the export of manufactured goods is oriented to countries, the economic structure changes faster, the degree of domestic and international industrial linkages is higher, and the manufacturing industry contributes more to growth.”

Take my country as an example. After the reform and opening up, China has become the world’s second largest economy from poverty and backwardness. The fundamental reason for the rapid economic development is the successful use of the labor advantage brought by the population. All walks of life have integrated into the global industrial chain, participated in the international division of labor, and eventually became the “world factory”.

According to the latest data from the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, the added value of my country’s manufacturing industry reached 26.9 trillion yuan in 2019, accounting for 28.1% of the world’sThe first manufacturing country status.

But after 40 years of development, this model is gradually facing challenges from both internal and external sources.

On the one hand, from the inside, the domestic manufacturing “labor shortage” has intensified year by year, and once became a social hot spot after the epidemic. Behind this is the demographic dividend that causes low-end industries to rely on low-cost labor, while young people are no longer satisfied with the meager income of traditional manufacturing workers. With the rapid development of the mobile Internet, they are looking for new professions such as couriers, riders, and online car-hailing.

In order to recruit more workers, the factory had to increase salary. The rising labor cost has further led to a new round of migration to Southeast Asian countries with lower labor costs in the manufacturing industry.

On the other hand, it is external, led by Germany’s “Fourth Industrial Revolution”, the “Intelligent Manufacturing Leadership Alliance” of the United States, and the “British Industry 2050 Strategy” of the United Kingdom. Internationally, many governments or organizations are vigorously promoting new forms of highly automated manufacturing, and the next generation of industrial manufacturing has gradually become a new trend.

In this context, in 2015 Premier Li Keqiang proposed the “making power” strategy. In the first “Ten-Year Program” “Made in China 2025”, “China Smart Manufacturing” is the main direction of development. Promote the transformation of traditional manufacturing industry, and alleviate the labor problems faced by China’s manufacturing industry by means of “machine substitution”.

In April this year, it went a step further. The Central Committee of the Communist Party of China explained the definition of “new infrastructure”, and clearly listed “Internet of Things, Industrial Internet” as the main ones in the construction of “information infrastructure” The direction of development.

Following the Fifth Plenary Session of the 19th Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, it was put forward again: “Insist on putting the emphasis on economic development on the real economy, and unswervingly build a manufacturing country, a country with a strong quality, a powerful network, Digital China promotes advanced industrial foundation and industrial chain modernization, and improves economic quality, efficiency and core competitiveness.”

Under the goal of “basically realizing socialist modernization by 2035” in the 14th Five-Year Plan period, “basically realizing a new type of industrialization” has also become the backbone of the driving force.

For the factories that are still hesitating, under the guidance of employment pressure and “new infrastructure” policies, the direction of progress has gradually become clear: With the support of IOT and big data technologies, through The digital transformation and construction of traditional production lines will achieve further optimization of production efficiency and cost.

This is not only a solution for local factories, but also a necessary change in production methods adopted in the process of promoting the development of my country’s manufacturing industry.

Internet of Things: the “nerve” of smart manufacturing

In fact, the popularity of smart manufacturing has not been smooth sailing. For enterprises, the use of low-end labor can not only save costs, but also make the production line more “flexible”.

For example, in the eyes of some business managers, traditional automated industrial processes often operate machines with pre-designed scripts. In a production line, every machine and every node is “dead”. It is necessary for technicians to provide the running script in advance and operate according to the script.

This is the reason why many manufacturing industries are reluctant to give up manual manufacturing: Compared with machines, humans have stronger adaptability, and manual production lines are more “flexible”. You can adapt to changes and adjust your work according to the status of the production line in real time.

And this also happens to be a common misunderstanding of the outside world about intelligent manufacturing control: in simple terms, intelligent manufacturing will use machines to replace human operations. But it is not simply to solve the problems of “energy, physical strength” and so on. It only relies on machines to automate the production process.

Instead, it goes a step further by using the Internet of Things technology to conduct deeper inspections on industrial data, and conduct real-time data exchange and processing between nodes. Optimize the status and efficiency of each node and each machine, and ultimately promote the efficient operation of the entire system.

In this process, the Internet of Things (IOT), which is the source of almost all data, has become an important part of the evolution of the Industrial Internet.

TCL Gechuang Dongzhi intelligent manufacturing expert Wang Jin mentioned the “20-character mantra of intelligent manufacturing”, which are: state recognition, real-time analysis, precise execution, independent decision-making and learning improvement. He emphasized: The Internet of Things technology solves the three problems of state recognition, real-time analysis, and precise execution.

In smart manufacturing, the data collected through IoT sensors can not only achieve more accurate operation with low latency, but also collect and record the status data of each node in the production process like a “nerve”. With the help of more advanced communication technologies such as 5G, data can be exchanged and flowed between nodes, just as “blood” passes through “blood vessels.”

When the entire system is operational, the production process “lives”: through recording and data exchange, the system judges its own work content in real time, reminds potential crises; predicts potential failures for maintenance personnel in advance and reduces maintenance costs; And under ideal circumstances, self-optimize the production process (time-sensitive network), which reflects stronger “flexibility” than manual assembly lines.

Xie Qingshan, China Industry Sales Manager of Intel’s Asia-Pacific Internet of Things Division, said that compared with the Internet technologies that ordinary users often encounter, the industrial Internet has two unique requirements: “real-time” and “timeliness” Sex”.

Real-timeness means that as the degree of refinement of manufactured products becomes higher and higher, it is necessary to control mechanical equipment more quickly, real-time and accurately in the manufacturing process; and timeliness means that more Timely and synchronized cooperation maximizes the efficiency of the work process.

With the flow of data, the Internet of Things has greatly promoted real-time feedback and closed-loop control during industrial production.

What has changed by the Internet of Things

As the manufacturing production line process becomes more and more complex, the products being manufactured become more and more sophisticated, and the problems that were once difficult to solve manually are gradually being overcome in the era of intelligent manufacturing.

Wang Jin mentioned a specific application of machine vision for the Internet of Things: In a manufacturing case, there is a process in the panel production process, which needs to be judged by human eyes.Circuit quality problems in the circuit board printing process. Every time hundreds of people in the filming room watch 300,000 defective photos every day, the hard work of the work has brought great mobility to the job. With the help of the vision sensor and AI technology of the Internet of Things, the system can automatically complete the entire process at high speed.

From a longer-term perspective, the Internet of Things technology will not only solve human problems, but also bring changes in all aspects of the entire production line process. In the Intel semiconductor factory mentioned by Xie Qingshan, the Internet of Things is bringing new possibilities to the maintenance process of the production line.

Due to the high degree of precision of the chip, Intel installed a large number of ventilation equipment in the factory during the production process to keep the production environment clean. In the production process, the damage or failure of the ventilation equipment will have a great impact on the production line. How to maintain these ventilation equipment stably is a challenge for the factory.

Before this, Intel could only avoid potential risks by frequently testing and scrapping the equipment in advance, which inevitably constitutes a certain degree of waste.

After the transformation of the production line based on intelligent manufacturing, for the abnormal state of the ventilator when the ventilator failed, Intel installed sensors for each ventilator, and compared the normal and abnormal state data, such as vibration Frequency, current, voltage, sound, etc. At the data level, determine the potential hidden danger information of the equipment in advance, and perform predictive maintenance. While maintaining the stability of the production line, the cost is greatly reduced.

Xie Qingshan believes that “predictive maintenance” is the technology that can benefit factories the fastest in the process of industrial Internet’s transformation of traditional factories. Its benefits are reflected in two aspects:

  • On the one hand, it is the stability of the production line: reduce the loss of raw materials after the production line failure and the commercial impact of the extended delivery cycle;

  • On the other hand, it is cost reduction: it reduces the labor cost of technicians to check and replace equipment. At the same time, make best use of equipment and materials to avoid waste caused by frequent purchases.

The way to solve these problems is relying on the foundation of the mature application of Intel IoT technology.

Xie Qingshan believes that a major feature of China’s current manufacturing industry is that the number of employees and scale are far ahead of other countries with manufacturing industries. This is precisely because after the reform and opening up, under the rise of the manufacturing industry, China has formed a world-class product.The most diverse and largest manufacturing system.

At the same time, the industrial characteristics of different categories have caused the uneven development of the domestic manufacturing industry: leading companies have begun to build black light factories, and there are even more small manufacturing factories that are far from true digitalization. There is still a long way to go for transformation.

To solve these problems, a more integrated low-cost platform solution is needed.


For example, at the hardware level, Intel found that when traditional general-purpose chips are applied to the field of intelligent manufacturing, they cannot well support the function of time-sensitive networking, that is, they cannot properly arrange and adjust upstream and downstream processes. . So they integrate all these functions into the underlying hardware in the new generation of processors, and it will be easier when the upper-level factories need to build their own intelligent manufacturing platform.

From a software perspective, in order to better support the above hardware functions, Intel has built a global AI+IoT platform to provide a one-stop smart IoT solution. With the support of the industrial production control platform (ECI), the application and realization of the industrial Internet will be simpler.

This kind of work doesn’t seem complicated, but it takes three to five years to realize it from preliminary research, developer programming, and finally burning the function into the chip. For ordinary enterprises before, the cost of finding a stable solution is still high. And such a mature, universal, and integrated solution will also become a powerful impetus for intelligent manufacturing. The advantages of this set of technology are fully reflected in the Audi factory. The improvement of machine vision can achieve the effect of full inspection, and then greatly Increased efficiency.

Behind the popularization of intelligent manufacturing, there will be a rapid development of more derivative intelligent manufacturing applications. In this regard, Wang Jin mentioned the concept of “data pressure”:

In the first phase of the Internet of Things project of TCL Huaxing Optoelectronics, Ge Chuang Dongzhi connected more than 6,000 devices and nearly 20,000 information points, which can generate nearly two terabytes of data a day. Just like a reservoir, a large amount of data will generate data pressure, which will promote the development of intelligent manufacturing derivative applications.

There is no doubt that the cases and data behind the entire manufacturing industry will drive the industry to bring greater changes. This requires the joint efforts of the Chinese manufacturing industry.

Conclusion

“An ancient Chinese wisdom called “water conservancy without fighting for all things”. Our products are like water, which can penetrate thousands of households and enable enterprises to develop better.” Xie Qingshan said.

With the gradual improvement of the underlying software and hardware technology, the transformation of the manufacturing industry based on the Internet of Things technology is gradually allowing more companies to enter the field of intelligent manufacturing, and more data will promote the development of various industrial applications. Production efficiency has been further improved, and the problem of “labor shortage” may no longer exist.

The change in the intelligence of the entire manufacturing industry will surely drive the country’s economic development and change everyone’s life, becoming the fundamental driving force for the next step in driving the progress of the national economy.