Zhou Hongren, executive deputy director of the National Informatization Expert Advisory Committee, talked about the basic understanding of the three stages in the series of "On Intelligent Manufacturing". How to implement intelligent manufacturing, we need to consider the three fulcrum of intelligent manufacturing: product, equipment and process.
The first thing to consider is what is the goal of driving smart manufacturing. Obviously, the pursuit of the enterprise is the product, rather than to make the enterprise how fashionable. When a company sells a product, it is not about how beautiful or modern the product line is, but about what the value of the product is. Product is the performance of the enterprise facing the society. The goal of intelligent manufacturing is the product, not the intelligent manufacturing itself.
Therefore, the intellectualization of products is one of the primary issues that enterprises must consider. Intelligent manufacturing if you can not produce intelligent products, intelligent manufacturing has lost the meaning of The Times. Moreover, if the products of enterprises are not intelligent, the possibility of products and enterprises being eliminated in the future is great.
The second fulcrum is equipment. The equipment in every key link of the production process (including research and development, design) must be intelligent. If this intelligence cannot be realized, labor productivity and labor efficiency cannot be greatly improved, and enterprises may not be competitive. If it is not digital, networked and intelligent production equipment, it is not the advanced manufacturing equipment of this era. Moreover, if the equipment is not intelligent, it may not be able to produce the intelligent products that the enterprise wants to produce.
The third fulcrum is the intelligent problem of enterprise production process. Intelligent equipment is to solve the intelligent problem of "point" in the production process; Only by realizing the intellectualization of the whole process of production, can enterprises realize the intellectualization of the whole enterprise and maximize the benefits of intellectualization.
Intelligent manufacturing is the first fulcrum
A machine tool factory, if the production equipment and process are intelligent, and it produces the machine tool is general machine tool, no intelligent elements, then the future of the machine tool factory is very worrying. Because, he will not go to buy such not enough intelligent machine tools.
Therefore, when any enterprise considers how to develop its intelligent manufacturing, it should first think of how to achieve intelligent products. Even if the production process is not fully or partially intelligent, intelligent products can be made, then enterprises should first consider the problem of intelligent products.
Product intelligentization is a new and important trend in the development of computing technology. The original purpose of the invention of computing technology is for scientific calculation. Then, it develops to support the information processing and dissemination of all kinds of human business activities, namely business computing. After the 1990s, with the development of the Internet, QQ, WeChat, Facebook and so on began to rise, and computing technology penetrated into people's social life, greatly promoting the development of social computing. Now, computing technology began to infiltrate into a variety of product fields, improve the level of intelligence of products, therefore, the next hot spot of computing technology application, is product computing.
Intelligent equipment is the biggest difficulty
Equipment is the biggest difficulty in intelligent manufacturing.
Production equipment is generally more complex, and the volume may be small, the industrial software used is often very complex. This makes the production cost very high, the market is small, so there are not many enterprises willing or able to engage in intelligent equipment manufacturing. Moreover, because the development cycle of equipment is long, the risk of enterprise operation is great. In addition, the difficulty of equipment manufacturing is largely in the soft equipment above, without soft equipment, it is impossible to have "digital, network, intelligent". Take away the software, and all the achievements of information cease to exist. Industrial software is first of all an industrial product, and often is a high-end industrial product. This is the main difficulty of Made in China 2025, and the industry is far from fully aware of this point.
Process intelligence
The manufacturing industry of developed countries has taken the lead in the intellectualization of production equipment. Japan and Germany, in particular, have essentially cornered the global market for equipment for major manufacturing industries. The next step of intelligent manufacturing is to realize the intelligence of the process and complete the development from the "point" of equipment to the "line" of the process.
The most typical representative of process intelligence is exactly the goal of Industry 4.0 and Industrial Internet. Industry 4.0 proposes that the information system of enterprises should be integrated, including vertical integration and horizontal integration. Vertical integration is the Intranet of an enterprise mentioned in one of the series of Three Essays on Intelligent Manufacturing, while horizontal integration is the extranet of an enterprise. Now, to fully integrate the Intranet and extranet together, the data completely open up.
Integration of Intranet and Extranet
The realization of intelligent process
The goal of Industry 4.0, or the Industrial Internet, is not only to connect the Intranet and the extranet, but also to turn it into an intelligent physical system. Both can be represented by a "5C" (five layers) structure.
The bottom layer is the smart connectivity layer, the second layer is the data into information, and the third layer is the cloud computing data center of the enterprise. Here, it is necessary to compare the effective data obtained from the second layer processing with the expected value corresponding to the enterprise computer system. The fourth layer is the cognitive layer, according to the comparison of differences, find out where the problem is and how to solve the problem. Therefore, this layer is really a decision layer. The fifth layer is the configuration layer, can according to the decision requirements, through the computer network, to the person, to the thing, to the computer to reconfigure or change.
Such a five-layer structure constitutes a standard feedback control system, which can carry out real-time feedback and control on the control objects of the enterprise, namely: people (employees), machines, computer systems, various physical entities, etc. For such a feedback system, the corresponding technical support at each level is shown in the figure. It is the use of the most modern advanced technology, the industrial Internet to achieve the whole process of enterprise business activities of the intelligent control.
Industrial Internet and Industry 4.0 "5C (five tiers)" architecture
This architecture design describes the internal and external three-tier structure of the industrial Internet system. From the edge layer, to the platform layer, to the enterprise layer. In the edge layer is mainly the gateway of the edge, collect a variety of data; After sending the data to the platform layer, the platform layer does the necessary processing and analysis of the data; After the analysis is done, it is sent to the enterprise layer and sent to the enterprise application system. The enterprise will make different analysis according to different applications, make judgments and decisions, and then send the data back to the platform layer and the edge layer, until it reaches the various departments and units connected inside and outside the enterprise.
Obviously, data analysis and processing in the industrial Internet system is extremely important, including: the acquisition of endpoint data, advanced data processing technology to extract information from the data, the analysis and calculation of various decision-making models, as well as the output of system results. Among them, a large number of methods are used in computational science: need modeling, need algorithms, need data, and so on, and finally produce decision data. Of course, security, trust, privacy, etc., are also considered in detail in the structure.
Intelligent Manufacturing and the Industrial Internet
Industrial Internet platform, is an enterprise as the center of the platform, rather than say in the entire industrial industry to build a large so-called "industrial Internet platform". The so-called platformization is the trend of development, in fact, it refers to the platformization of enterprises. Every large enterprise will have its own enterprise platform, and will not move its business to the platform of other enterprises.
If all the resources and energy of intelligent manufacturing are invested in the industrial Internet platform, and the platform is understood as the platform of the industry, it may misjudge the development direction of intelligent manufacturing. The most pressing task is to make our products and equipment intelligent, which is the key direction of intelligent manufacturing for China at present.
