Σco Time | How to use "light" to promote the digital transformation of factories

[Original article from 51CTO.com] On April 2, Huawei held a wonderful event on the #Σco时间# live broadcast platform with the theme of "How to use "light" to leverage the digital transformation of factories". Four guest speakers, including Kuang Jishuang, senior solution expert of Huawei's China Government and Enterprise Intelligent Manufacturing Business Department, Xue Yuanfeng, sales director of Huawei's China Government and Enterprise Access Products, Wei Jingchenxi, senior product manager of Nanjing Juwei Network Co., Ltd., and Liu Lin, business expert in the field of intelligent manufacturing of Tuowei Information Systems Co., Ltd., shared Huawei's thoughts on digital factories and intelligent manufacturing from multiple aspects such as the technical architecture of digital factories and practical cases, as well as new paths for digital transformation of manufacturing companies such as XCMG Group, which attracted the attention of thousands of netizens online.

Digital factory top-level design and planning

Huawei is well known as a global ICT (information and communication) infrastructure and smart terminal provider, but in essence, Huawei is also a large-scale manufacturing company. Therefore, Huawei also faces the challenges faced by most manufacturing companies, such as: increasing delivery pressure, shortening time to market, increasingly complex product processes, user customization of manufacturing models, and expanding production scale.

In the face of challenges, traditional methods and tools are no longer sufficient. Kuang Jishuang believes that the digital transformation strategy of the manufacturing industry that adopts "three-in-one (product data flow, enterprise value flow, and intelligent physical flow) and edge-cloud collaboration" and "using high-tech to promote digital transformation strategy is the only way for current manufacturing companies to cope with challenges and gradually achieve their business goals." Based on the above principles, Huawei has built the overall business architecture and technical architecture of the digital factory.

As shown in the figure above, the overall business architecture of the digital factory is mainly divided into five levels: field equipment, data platform, business platform, integrated application, and operation monitoring. The goals of this architecture design are: less-manpowered production, multiple business systems, full-process integration, and multi-level linkage.

The overall technical architecture of the digital factory also includes five levels: field equipment, network transmission, integration platform, business components, and solutions, and the corresponding key technologies are: production automation, full factory connection, management platform, application service number, and unmanned decision-making. Kuang Jishuang gave a detailed interpretation of the key product technologies. For example, Huawei's 5G full-stack solution integrates machine vision and AI through high-speed, low-latency 5G technology; through collaborative control between machines, it realizes real-time system operation and real-time feedback linkage; in remote control, it achieves real-time and security, such as remote control of excavators in harsh environments; in addition, mobile robots that apply this solution can achieve large-scale group control and meet mobility requirements; and in scenarios such as wearable devices, AR work guidance, and VR virtual factories, this solution realizes industrial AR and monitoring. Another example is Huawei's ROMA platform, which supports comprehensive integration of "A, B, C, and D". A refers to application-to-application integration, B refers to enterprise-to-enterprise integration, C refers to multi-cloud integration, and D refers to integration between OT and IT. It is worth mentioning that the ROMA platform can deploy customer data to other cloud platforms to achieve cross-cloud backup and disaster recovery.

By using Huawei's products, technologies and solutions, manufacturing companies can quickly establish nine core capabilities of digital factories, including equipment autonomy, production line collaboration, process integration, business collaboration, hierarchical linkage, automatic decision-making, ubiquitous interaction, spatial wandering, and time travel.

Huawei's all-optical industrial park solution based on industrial PON network

We are currently in a new industrial revolution. Xue Yuanfeng, Huawei's China Government and Enterprise Access Product Sales Director, said that after mechanization, electrification, and automation, we are ushering in the fourth industrial revolution represented by intelligence: intelligence is embedded in all connected things and all business processes. ICT technologies such as big data analysis, cloud computing, mobility, and the Internet of Things have become the foundation of the intelligent industrial revolution.

Then, Xue Yuanfeng asked everyone a question: Why should PON be introduced to build an industrial Internet network? PON is a very mature technology, which is very compatible with the current trend of industrial digitalization and intelligence. The industrial PON solution has the following four advantages: First, simple architecture. Two-layer network, desktop cloud services can directly reach the data center; second, high reliability. Optical fiber is resistant to electromagnetic interference and corrosion; third, easy evolution. Services can be expanded on demand, bandwidth can be smoothly upgraded, and wiring does not need to be changed; fourth, intelligent operation and maintenance. Plug and play without debugging, and faults can be perceived in real time, and the troubleshooting response time is reduced to minutes. Through centralized and unified management, the real-time online service can be efficiently guaranteed.

According to Xue Yuanfeng, Huawei CampusOptiX all-optical industrial park solution (POL all-optical park for short) is committed to building a LAN network based on PON. Based on the traditional campus network, combined with the new changes in cloud services and smart terminals, PON network is used as converged access, while integrating other modules of the smart park. Then, he gave an in-depth interpretation of the three application scenarios of production network networking, industrial park office and Wi-Fi coverage, and video surveillance backhaul, and introduced OLTs that meet different bandwidth access, ONUs that meet various application scenarios, and innovative products such as optoelectronic composite cables, POE+, and SFPONU.

He said that in the YOFC Qianjiang Science and Technology Park All-Optical Manufacturing Park project, Huawei's POL All-Optical Park fully met the demands of a network carrying the office, manufacturing, and production services of the 700-acre production park, helping it to effectively reduce energy consumption and network failure rate, and realize the passive network's natural immunity to electromagnetic interference. At the same time, it achieved rapid network deployment, and reduced overall operating investment by 40%. In addition, Huawei, which "produces its own parachutes and jumps first", has also deployed an all-optical industrial park solution in its southern factory to meet the evolution of intelligent manufacturing networks, and achieved the speed-up evolution of the manufacturing network from 50Mbps to 2000Mbps, achieving millisecond-level imperceptible transmission of massive data on site, laying the network foundation for intelligent manufacturing.

All-optical network helps XCMG explore new paths for digital transformation

In order to help everyone understand the application of Huawei's POL all-optical campus more intuitively, Wei Jingchenxi, senior product manager of Nanjing Juwei Network Co., Ltd., brought a classic case to netizens - sharing how XCMG Group used Huawei's POL all-optical campus solution to achieve a smooth transformation to a digital factory.

As the trend of modern industry and digital transformation becomes more and more mainstream, XCMG Group's original information system urgently needs to be carried by a more efficient, secure and reliable basic network. Its subsidiary XCMG Fire Protection hopes to carry out full optical transformation of the new industrial park, requiring the design and construction of an office network with complete functions and facilities and equipment; planning of information points in various scenes in the park, with 2 wired information points and 1 telephone information point per person per workstation, and no floor cabinets can be placed in the room; full consideration of information security issues, unified control of external access to the internal network, and ensuring that the equipment can work stably under the temperature and humidity of the factory building.

To meet the above requirements, Huawei deployed the core switch S12710 model that carries GPON network services + OLT equipment MA5800-X7 model, and various devices such as the box-type EG8240P suitable for office network/comprehensive building scenarios. The entire network uses optical fiber as the basic medium for deployment to meet the long-distance node access requirements of industrial parks; splitters are deployed flexibly, and weak current rooms are not used in office and comprehensive building scenarios, and optical fiber splitter boxes are used for wiring.

Talking about the specific implementation of the project, Wei Jingchenxi said that it originated from tradition and was changed from tradition. Based on the data communication network, the horizontal subsystem is replaced with optical fiber without changing the design of the vertical subsystem; the planning of weak current rooms is reduced, and the two weak current rooms on each floor are reduced to one, and the planning of strong current rooms is minimized; in terms of equipment network maintenance, the monitoring network planning and public wireless are centrally deployed. Second, ensure independent office access for each workstation. Third, the comprehensive building only needs to plan one weak current room. Fourth, the living area is unified with wired + wireless. Fifth, in terms of security, the management of the new factory area is more refined and the terminal business is safer. Sixth, the factory area is industrialized, the production area has "zero" cabinets, and is deployed in the form of information boxes.

Intelligent equipment connection enables digital upgrade of factories in the equipment manufacturing industry

How do the technologies mentioned above combine with the business of enterprise production and manufacturing? Focusing on specific production scenarios, as a partner of Huawei, Liu Lin, a business expert in the field of intelligent manufacturing at Tuowei Information, introduced the application of production scheduling, process quality, equipment operation and maintenance, material distribution and other businesses in digital factories. It is reported that Tuowei Information and Huawei have maintained continuous, extensive and in-depth cooperation. In the field of manufacturing industry, after more than 20 years of experience accumulation and continuous research and development of technology, Tuowei intelligent manufacturing solutions have been created to help manufacturing companies build a "cloud, pipe, edge, and end" digital factory architecture, and help enterprises achieve comprehensive digital and intelligent transformation.

There is no doubt that the end refers to the device end, and the edge refers to the edge side. On the edge side, there are a variety of industrial gateway products, combined with Huawei's Atlas, Tuowei Information's self-developed general-driven product components and third-party cooperative products, to achieve extensive interconnection and perception of the production site equipment end, drive intelligent adaptation and lightweight model edge computing; in the pipeline, through cooperation with Huawei, high-speed, wide-area information transmission and communication capabilities are achieved; in the cloud, RDB, TSDB, microservices, AI and algorithm models are integrated, and a public cloud platform serving multiple levels of the factory is developed. Through unified information resource standards, a data chain for the entire product production process is created to form a real-time and accurate data source serving the application, and a visualized digital factory is realized through this platform.

During the live broadcast, Liu Lin focused on the following aspects of the solution and combined them with scenarios for in-depth interpretation, so that everyone can understand it more thoroughly. He pointed out that many companies are very concerned about what changes digitalization can bring to corporate operations, and the most intuitive of these is the visualization of digital factories. By collecting a large amount of production operation data, manufacturing process data, warehousing and distribution data, process quality data, equipment operation data, energy consumption data, etc. from the production site, through edge-side computing and high-speed data transmission and processing, AR, VR, image processing and other technologies are then used to intuitively display production details, helping corporate managers deal with complex resource issues.

Specifically speaking of production business, in intelligent scheduling, from the preparatory work such as arrival confirmation, equipment capacity, and material completeness inspection before production, to the real-time production status and equipment operation status monitoring during production, the work order is dynamically adjusted and optimized to improve production efficiency, and then after production, the subsequent production preparation is driven by automatic production reporting, forming intelligent and efficient scheduling.

In terms of agile processes, the solution divides agile processes into five links: issuing process specifications, controlling quality using production process specifications, inspecting the quality of work-in-progress, tracing process data, and conducting back-end product quality analysis. At the same time, through AR+AI+innovative technologies, quality business management is fully enabled, and big data+AI analysis is used to accurately output the value of quality data, and the process is comprehensively and continuously optimized and improved.

In terms of online operation and maintenance, through the establishment of equipment health models, evaluation of equipment health, provision of maintenance warnings, and AR maintenance remote guidance and other technical means, we can reduce the reliance on experience in the equipment operation process, reduce the frequency of manual inspections, and shorten the waiting time for the supply of important parts and components, ultimately allowing the equipment to remain stable in the reliable range for a long time.

In summary, through Tuowei's intelligent manufacturing solutions, enterprises can realize the transformation of operation and maintenance from experience-based judgment to scientific decision-making, reducing equipment downtime by 30%; quickly respond to changes in customer market demand, and shorten the marketing order delivery cycle by 30%; realize visual and transparent management of the production site, quickly resolve abnormal conditions on site, and improve the company's overall production efficiency by 20%; through real-time tracking of the process quality of production products, improve the timeliness of response to process quality issues, and reduce quality errors in the production process by 40%.

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