Jovin
On November 5, the 2023 Industrial Software Ecology Conference opened in Shenzhen. With the theme of "Building a New Generation of Industrial Software System and Leading the High-quality Development of the Manufacturing Industry", the conference invited representatives of the government, universities, industry experts and enterprises to exchange and share on the layout of the core industrial software industry, innovative applications, industrial empowerment, and industrial integration, and demonstrated the cutting-edge technologies, innovative products and solutions of the entire industrial industry chain.
At the summit, Qiu Pingping, CTO of Huawei's industrial software and industrial cloud, delivered a speech titled "Reshaping on the Cloud, Next-Generation Industrial Software Accelerates Product Digitalization and Enables R&D and Innovation", introducing the practice and outlook of Huawei's product digitalization and next-generation industrial software applications, and jointly released the hardware development production line CraftArts with dozens of tool and software vendors to jointly build a next-generation industrial software system on the cloud.
Qiu Qiu, CTO of Huawei's industrial software and industrial cloud
Digital innovation of Huawei's products
Accelerate industrial software upgrades and reshapes
In the era of intelligence, industrial software carries the core capabilities of enterprise R&D innovation and intelligent manufacturing. From basic materials, circuit board modules to product R&D, from system design, structural design, product simulation, process planning, product manufacturing to enterprise operation and supply chain management, industrial software is ubiquitous.
"Industrial software has become the bottom-line capability of Huawei's hardware engineers to innovate and improve, and no engineer can develop a leading product without industrial software." In his speech, Qiu Pingping took Huawei's practice as an example to introduce Huawei's business scope covering different fields such as ICT infrastructure, terminals, cloud computing, digital energy, and intelligent vehicle solutions. With the continuous acceleration of product development and business innovation, higher requirements are put forward for industrial software.
The research and development of high-speed, high-frequency, high-density, and high-bandwidth PCB boards requires large-scale PCB multi-layer design capabilities.
Satellite communication and micropump liquid cooling technology require software capabilities such as space-ground signal simulation and electronic heat dissipation simulation.
The ultimate quality and delivery requirements require efficient scheduling and management of flexible production and efficient production in hundreds of factories.
In the above process, it is necessary to connect the planning, design, R&D, and manufacturing data of all products end-to-end and ensure safety and reliability.
"These are all new challenges that the digitalization of products poses for the new generation of industrial software." "Based on product digitalization, new scenarios and new needs, we hope to work with industry partners to reshape the new generation of industrial software with cloud computing architecture as the core. ”
In Huawei's product digitalization practice, this effort has already begun to bear fruit.
In the R&D process, Huawei has implemented the digitalization of product hardware design, introducing single-board design and simulation, structural design and simulation, and shortening the overall R&D cycle by 20%.
In the production process, through the integration of design and manufacturing, virtual simulation, virtual verification, AI quality inspection, intelligent scheduling, etc., the order fulfillment cycle is shortened by 76%.
Qiu said that Huawei is working with partner companies to redefine the architecture, standards, technologies, and methods of industrial software. With the cloud as the core, we will continue to build root technologies through the empowerment and innovation of cloud-native, big data, and AI technologies, and build a next-generation industrial software system based on Huawei's application scenarios.
Metamodel-driven
Build a next-generation industrial software data base
Data is a critical first step in the digitalization of products and industrial software. Qiu said that in the past few years, the team has carried out an in-depth combing of more than 2,800 IT systems and more than 8,000 tools within the company, trying to integrate IT systems and tool software. However, the evaluation found that this massive amount of work was almost impossible to complete in the traditional mode. "We have been thinking about how to connect all the IT systems and tools and software of the enterprise into a line and integrate them as a whole."
Based on years of experience in hardware development, the R&D team sorted out 24 typical structures, 555 objects, and more than 18,000 attributes in six major areas, including product planning, R&D, manufacturing, supply, marketing, and service, as well as materials, boards, components, and complete machines, and further refined two types of meta-models and six types of meta-relationships to build a full-lifecycle data model for industrial products.
Driven by meta-models, HUAWEI CLOUD has built the Industrial Digital Model Engine (iDME), a brand-new industrial digital model-driven engine in six years, which precipitates 24 typical industrial data models and supports more than 80 types of industrial data management functions, such as data version, data traceability, and data quality. These functions can not only operate graphically, automatically generate data APIs, improve the efficiency of data service development, but also support tens of billions of full data graphs, which can realize cross-system connection, automatic data mapping, and automatic association, and open up the data of enterprise research, production, supply, marketing, and service, forming a digital thread and data twin of product development.
In the product data management system (PDM), which is the core of enterprise production, Huawei has implemented comprehensive cloud-based, service-oriented transformation, and process remodeling through cloud innovation and combined with the tool capabilities of partner vendors, and further upgraded the product PDM to cross-service "xDM" intelligent data service on HUAWEI CLOUD, greatly improving process efficiency and user experience.
Based on the requirements of full-process collaboration of industrial software, HUAWEI CLOUD has also worked with partners to further build the Industrial Data Management and Collaboration Solution (IPD Center), which collects and manages data related to products such as system engineering, EDA design, structural design, simulation design, manufacturing, and supply chain, and provides a one-stop role desktop to support end-to-end efficient collaboration, such as master data collaboration, cross-enterprise collaboration, and product compliance collaboration.
At present, more and more industrial software companies are innovating based on the iDME data base.
The project took only 4 months from customized development to system migration and launch, which was shortened by 50% compared with the traditional model and improved the system performance by 10 times, which was fully affirmed by customers.
With hundreds of millions of data volumes, 290 million concurrent calls to interfaces in a single day, and 10,000 simultaneous online concurrency, the access performance of the combined interface is less than 500 milliseconds, and the single interface is less than 300 milliseconds, which has completely changed the history of product management (PDM) in the past.
In manufacturing, for intelligent manufacturing
HUAWEI CLOUD officially launched CraftArts, a hardware development production line
To further improve the efficiency of collaboration between industrial software and enable hardware development engineers to work efficiently, HUAWEI CLOUD and dozens of tool and software vendors jointly released CraftArts, a hardware development production line, for hardware product development scenarios.
Based on a unified data base, the hardware development production line CraftArts brings together the development tool capabilities of Huawei and its partner vendors to provide homogeneous and homologous product data services, as well as one-stop IT tool chain services for hardware design, development, simulation, and trial production, and build a circuit board EDA tool chain, structural design tool chain, industrial simulation platform, and design and manufacturing integration platform for the industry. Through collaborative mode innovation and underlying algorithm upgrades, CraftArts, a hardware development production line, is continuously improving the processing efficiency of industrial software, enabling efficient collaboration in hardware R&D in the industry.
Taking the circuit board EDA toolchain (CraftArts pEDA) as an example, the service includes HUAWEI CLOUD's schematic design tools, layout design tools, comprehensive simulation tools, and electronic assembly tools for multiple ecosystem enterprises.
In the schematic design process, CraftArts upgraded the original stand-alone design tool to a collaborative design tool on the cloud with the development concept of "running in small steps", and realized "100 people draw one picture online" through parallel scheduling and data governance capabilities on the cloud. Based on this service, engineers not only do not need to combine maps, but can also interact and iterate in real time to achieve efficient cross-regional collaboration. In addition, CraftArts has built-in Huawei's engineering experience, ensures the quality of drawings through online intelligent inspection, and continuously improves the development experience through multi-level caching, asynchronous computing, and logic optimization, reducing the operation time of complex scenarios by more than 40% compared with traditional tools.
In the layout design process, CraftArts optimizes data access processing, primitive calculation, graphics rendering, and other aspects based on graph-oriented intelligent policy scheduling, which can support ultra-large-scale and complex layout design, making design operations smoother and more reasonable. In addition, the service supports more than 200 place-and-route rules practiced by Huawei, and automatically detects design errors at an early stage, improving the success rate of the first version.
Currently, more than 18,000 Huawei engineers are working on the CraftArts board EDA toolchain every day, according to Qiu. In Huawei's high-speed, high-density, and multi-layer complex PCB design scenarios, CraftArts shortens the entire hardware development cycle by 40% compared with the industry average, and increases the success rate of the first version by 30%.
"CraftArts has been deployed on a large scale at Huawei, which not only ensures business continuity, but also further improves the efficiency of hardware operations. Through a unified data base and a development tool chain that connects the dots, we hope to work with industrial software partners to serve thousands of industries such as electronics, automobiles, equipment, and new energy, accelerate the R&D and innovation driven by a new generation of industrial software, and empower the high-quality development of the manufacturing industry. Qiu Pingping said.
Looking to the future, HUAWEI CLOUD is committed to building an industrial aPaaS black land, working with more partners to accelerate R&D breakthroughs in root technologies, helping the next generation of industrial software thrive, and building a prosperous next-generation industrial software ecosystem.
Review: Yu Zaozao
Editor-in-charge: Huo Yue
Editor: Hu Na