The essence of a round of industrial revolution is the standard battle for the new global industrial revolution in the future. Each country is building its own smart manufacturing system. Smart manufacturing and smart factories have also become the two main goals of the new round of industrial revolution.

01 | The main features of intelligent manufacturing

Intelligent manufacturing is the core of the new industrial revolution, it is not to further improve the efficiency and accuracy of equipment, but to use equipment more rationally and intelligently to maximize the value of manufacturing through intelligent operation and maintenance For industrial enterprises, on the production and factory side, it can still be based on scale, standardization, and automation, but it also needs to be given new features of flexibility, customization, visualization, and low carbonization; on the business model side, Subversive changes will occur-the mode in which producers influence consumers is replaced by the mode in which consumer demand determines product production; at the national level, it is necessary to build an industrial Internet that is more secure and reliable than consumer Internet.

As a broad concept, intelligent manufacturing includes five aspects: product intelligence, equipment intelligence, production method intelligence, management intelligence and service intelligence.

Product intelligence

Product intelligence is to integrate sensors, processors, memory, communication modules, and transmission systems into various products, so that the products have dynamic storage, perception, and communication capabilities, enabling product traceability, identification, and location.

Computers, smart phones, smart TVs, smart robots, and smart wearables are the “indigenous people” of the Internet of Things. These products are network terminals from the time they are produced. Traditional air conditioners, refrigerators, automobiles, machine tools, etc. are all “immigrants” of the Internet of Things. These products will need to be connected to the online world in the future. Experts estimate that by 2020, the total number of “indigenous people” and “immigrants” of these Internet of Things will total more than 50 billion, and this process will continue for 10, 20, or even 50 years.

Intelligent equipment

through the integration and integration of advanced manufacturing, information processing, artificial intelligence and other technologies, can form an intelligent production system with self-organizing and adaptive functions such as perception, analysis, reasoning, decision-making, execution, autonomous learning and maintenance, and networking And coordinated production facilities, all of which belong to intelligent equipment.

In the era of Industry 4.0, the process of equipment intelligence can be carried out in two dimensions: stand-alone intelligence, and smart production lines, smart workshops, and smart factories formed by the interconnection of stand-alone devices.

Pure R&D and production-end transformation are not all of intelligent manufacturing, and front-end transformation based on channel and consumer insights is also an important part.

Production methods: Intelligent

personalized customization, minimal production, service-oriented manufacturing, cloud manufacturing, and other new formats and models. Its essence is to reorganize the relationships between customers, suppliers, sellers, and internal organizations of the enterprise, and reconstruct the information in the production system. Flow, product flow, and capital flow, and rebuild a new industrial value chain, ecosystem, and competitive landscape.

In the industrial age, product value is defined by the enterprise. And intelligent manufacturing can realize personalized customization, which not only eliminates the intermediate link, but also accelerates business flow. The product value is no longer defined by the enterprise, but by the user.

Intelligent management

With the continuous deepening of vertical integration, horizontal integration, and end-to-end integration, the timeliness, completeness, and accuracy of enterprise data continue to improve, which will inevitably make management more accurate, more efficient, and more scientific.

Intelligence service

intelligence service is the core of intelligent manufacturing, more and more manufacturing enterprises have realized the importance of the transition from a production-oriented manufacturing to services-oriented manufacturing. In the future, online and offline O2O services will be realized. The two forces will face each other in terms of service intelligence. One force is the continuous expansion of traditional manufacturing services, and the other force is from consumer Internet to industrial Internet, such as WeChat connects not only people in the future, but also equipment and devices, services and services, people and services. The full life cycle management of new service products such as personalized R&D design, general integration, general contracting, etc. will continue to appear along with the changes in production methods.

Experts from Siemens and the Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Research Promotion believe that Industry 4.0 needs to build an intelligent ecosystem. When intelligence is everywhere, connections are everywhere, data is everywhere, devices and devices, people and people The connection between time, things and things, and between people and things will become closer and closer, and eventually there will inevitably be a situation where one system connects to another system, small systems make up big systems, and big systems make up larger systems-for industry In terms of 4.0 target intelligent manufacturing, it is a system of systems.

02 | Main Features of Smart Factory

Smart factory realizes its own operation, connection and communication with machines, communication between products and equipment, and realization of “machine manufacturing machine”. Each machine has vitality, and the factory will become more and more like a person, with a difference in IQ. As the factory’s “intelligence quotient” improves, its degree of intelligence becomes higher and higher.

The smart factory has three major characteristics:

First: the information infrastructure is highly interconnected, including production equipment, robots, operators, materials and finished products.

Second: There is a real-time system that can carry out information transmission and docking in time.

Third: From flexible, agile, intelligent to informatization, this is the development trend of smart factories.

At each stage, the flexibility to adjust the environment can meet the needs of different products, achieve multi-variety small batch production, and at the same time can control the cost of such personalized production soaring problems.

03 | Typical examples of smart manufacturing and smart factories

Siemens Amberg factory The Siemens factory in Amberg , eastern Bavaria, Germany, has become a model of an intelligent future factory after 25 years of digital development. The degree of automation has reached about 75%, and the production capacity has increased by 8 times. The 1,150 employees of this factory are mainly engaged in computer operation and production process monitoring. The factory not only realizes the mathematics of the entire process from management, product design, R&D, production to logistics distribution, but also can realize real-time data interconnection with the US R&D center through advanced information technology. The main characteristics and typical cases of

Tesla’s “super factory” smart manufacturing and smart factory

Tesla, the “Apple of the automotive industry”, has to a certain extent matched the concept of intelligent manufacturing. Its core positioning of the cars it produces is not an electric car, but a large and mobile smart terminal with a brand new The human-computer interaction method makes the car an experience tool containing hardware, software, content and services through the Internet terminal. Tesla’s success is not only reflected in the breakthrough in energy technology, but also because its Internet thinking is integrated into automobile manufacturing.

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