"Among the global manufacturing strategies, Germany's Industry 4.0, Made in China 2025 and the US's Industrial Internet are the strongest. The US represents advanced technology, Germany represents advanced manufacturing, and China's manufacturing volume is the largest in the world These three strategies have the greatest impact on the world.” Chen Ming, deputy dean of Tongji University’s Sino-German School of Engineering and director of the Industry 4.0-Smart Factory Laboratory, said, “On our platform, there were only the first two and no industrial The Internet. Through the introduction of NI cooperation, this platform has also been established. So now the laboratory system has become very complete, and a lot of work can be carried out, and the respective characteristics of each strategy can be used to finally make applications to solve the problems of Made in China 2025 Contribution.” Recently, the Tongji University-National Instruments (NI) Industrial Internet Joint Experiment Center was officially unveiled at the Jiading Campus of Tongji University. The experimental center, jointly built by Tongji University and NI, is the first intelligent manufacturing laboratory with all elements of Industry 4.0 in China.

What is the Industrial Internet?

The Internet has created huge value in the field of consumption. From the PC era to the era of mobile Internet, due to the rising value created by interconnection, Internet applications have become the darling of capital, while traditional manufacturing has been neglected. The outflow of American manufacturing is very obvious. This has caused alerted the U.S. government. U.S. President Barack Obama made it clear in 2013 that he would "make the U.S. a magnetic field for new jobs and manufacturing," and ensure that the next manufacturing revolution takes place in the U.S.

The American industry began to consider how to replicate the success of the Internet in the consumer field to the industrial field. Jeff Immelt, chairman and CEO of General Electric, once wrote that we are ignoring the "huge value that IT technology can create in the industrial world - 86,000 people in productivity gains alone." billion dollars, twice the size of the future consumer internet market. It’s clear that the next wave of innovation will not be driven primarily by things like on-demand services or video streaming.”

"Now, we need to bring that same energy and passion to industry, addressing grand challenges in healthcare, infrastructure, power and transportation," he said.

Therefore, the Industrial Internet Consortium (Industrial Internet Consortium) came into being. In this industry organization established in 2014, there are now more than 200 members including not only American companies such as General Electric, IBM, Intel and NI, but also Chinese companies including Huawei and Haier. With many well-known companies in Europe and Japan, as well as universities and scientific research institutions such as the University of California, Berkeley, and the Wireless Network Center of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The Industrial Internet can be regarded as the American version of Industry 4.0, but it is still slightly different. According to Joe Salvo, Chairman of the Industrial Internet, "Industry 4.0 transforms traditional factories into intelligent networked factories, which is another innovation in the manufacturing industry. Industrial Internet It not only includes the manufacturing industry, but all basic industries that need to analyze data and information, such as home care, transportation, electric energy, and water treatment, are all applications of the Industrial Internet."

What is predictive maintenance?

The Industrial Internet Experiment Center of Tongji University and NI started from predictive maintenance and gradually expanded to all aspects of intelligent manufacturing. So what is predictive maintenance?

In order to demonstrate the real application scenarios of the Industrial Internet, in February 2016, the Industrial Internet Alliance announced 9 test platforms including condition monitoring and predictive maintenance test platforms (now expanded to 16), responsible for condition monitoring and predictive maintenance The members of the test platform are IBM and National Instruments.

Condition monitoring (CM) refers to the real-time monitoring of equipment operating status through sensors installed on the equipment, and predictive maintenance (PM) analyzes the collected operating data in order to detect equipment performance degradation or failure at an early stage. Signs are given, and executable suggestions are given, and production line maintenance personnel are notified to perform maintenance or troubleshooting, so as to minimize the loss of production stoppage caused by equipment failure and reduce equipment maintenance costs. In addition, the whole-process monitoring of equipment is also beneficial for equipment manufacturers to improve equipment.

At the unveiling ceremony, the advanced version of InsightCMEnterprise software released by NI is the CM/PM test platform solution. This solution faces the increasingly complex equipment monitoring problem, and properly solves the contradiction between test speed and test data volume. With InsightCM, users can have a deep understanding of the status of enterprise assets and equipment for maintenance and operation of machine positions. InsightCM is combined with NI industrial IoT technology platforms such as DIAdem and CompactRIO to carry out research in related fields such as distributed sensor measurement, intelligent terminal processing, analysis and open communication, and data management.

Industrial big data without analysis and processing is worthless

Made in China 2025 proposes to step into the ranks of manufacturing powerhouses within ten years. However, judging from the current situation of my country's industrial development, the task of realizing Made in China 2025 is very arduous. The status quo of Chinese manufacturing is high energy consumption, low added value, and at the low end of the value chain. In the overall product manufacturing process, design is equivalent to "drawing" and manufacturing relies on "manpower", while relying on digitization, automation, especially technological innovation and other elements that reflect the characteristics of modern manufacturing are obviously insufficient, and there is a big gap compared with manufacturing powerhouses.

To achieve the goal of Made in China 2025, personnel training and conceptual transformation are the key. As the teacher in charge of the Youth League Committee of Tongji University said, the mainstay of Made in China 2025 is now in the university, but the phenomenon of disconnection between university education and industry has been around for a long time. Therefore, the university and the industry work closely together, so that college students can get in touch with the industry's most advanced products at the campus stage. Advanced technology and concepts are very necessary. Dean Chen Ming also introduced that the Industry 4.0-Smart Factory Laboratory of Tongji University, as a training pilot for manufacturing and industry 4.0 of the Ministry of Education, has trained several batches of students, and many industry associations have also entrusted Tongji to conduct related training. Do a good job in the training of basic knowledge, but also keep the advanced nature forever, so that students can get in touch with the latest knowledge and concepts in the industry.

In terms of concepts, intelligent manufacturing cannot be simply understood as informatization and automation. "Intelligent manufacturing, interconnection, and interconnection of things are the differences between intelligent manufacturing and traditional manufacturing, but automation plus informatization does not mean intelligent manufacturing," Chen Ming said. "The auto production line has the highest degree of automation and the highest degree of informatization. , but now the automobile production line is not an intelligent production line. Why? The automobile production line is a fixed production line. If a link in the middle is broken, all other links will be forced to stop. Will the future automated production line be a fixed production line? In the dynamic production line, each link is directly controlled by the top layer. There must be more and more applications like this. Many companies are talking about intelligent manufacturing, but they have not yet understood this point. Only when everyone realizes this point can they understand interconnection meaning."

Tang Min, manager of the NI China Marketing Department, also agrees with this view, "If the big data generated by the interconnection of equipment cannot be effectively analyzed and processed, it will be worthless. Therefore, how to value industrial big data is the foundation of intelligent manufacturing. question."