Smart factory is an important practice area of intelligent manufacturing, which has attracted extensive attention from manufacturing enterprises and great attention from governments at all levels. In recent years, major economies around the world have been vigorously promoting the recovery of manufacturing. Under the boom of Industry 4.0, industrial Internet, Internet of Things, cloud computing and so on, many excellent manufacturing enterprises around the world have carried out smart factory construction practices.
At present, mainland manufacturing enterprises are facing huge pressure for transformation. On the one hand, factors such as rapidly rising labor costs, overcapacity, fierce competition, and increasing personalized customer needs have forced manufacturing companies to shift from low-cost competition strategies to establish differentiated competitive advantages. At the factory level, manufacturing enterprises are facing great pressure from recruitment difficulties and lack of professional technicians, and must reduce staff and increase efficiency, and urgently need to promote the construction of smart factories. On the other hand, emerging technologies such as the Internet of Things, collaborative robots, additive manufacturing, predictive maintenance, and machine vision have risen rapidly, providing good technical support for manufacturing enterprises to promote the construction of smart factories. Coupled with the strong support of the national and local governments, more and more large and medium-sized enterprises in various industries have started the journey of smart factory construction.
A smart factory has the following six distinctive features:
1. Device interconnection. It can realize the interconnection of equipment and equipment, through the integration with the equipment control system, as well as external sensors, etc., the real-time collection of equipment status, production completion information, quality information by the data acquisition and monitoring control system, and through the application of RFID, bar code (one-dimensional and two-dimensional) and other technologies, to achieve the traceability of the production process;
2. Widely used industrial software. MES, APS, energy management, quality management and other industrial software to achieve visualization and transparency of the production site.
3. Fully combine the concept of lean production. Embodying the concepts of industrial engineering and lean manufacturing, it enables order-driven, pull-driven production, minimizing work-in-process inventory and eliminating waste. To promote the construction of intelligent factories, we must fully combine the characteristics of enterprise products and processes. In the research and development stage, it is also necessary to vigorously promote standardization, modularization and serialization to lay the foundation for promoting lean production.
4. Realize flexible automation. Combined with the company's products and production characteristics, continue to improve the degree of automation of production, testing and factory logistics.
5. Pay attention to environmental friendliness and achieve green manufacturing. It can collect the energy consumption of equipment and production lines in time to achieve efficient use of energy. In dangerous and polluting links, priority is given to replacing labor with robots, and communication can realize the recycling and reuse of waste.
6. Real-time insights can be realized. Closing the loop from the delivery of production scheduling instructions to the feedback of completion information. By establishing a production command system, real-time insight into the plant's production, quality, energy consumption and equipment status information can be achieved to avoid unplanned downtime. By establishing a digital twin of the factory, you can easily gain insight into the status of the production site and assist all levels of management to make the right decisions.