Cloud manufacturing, how far is the future?

In the 1960s, American scientist John McCarthy proposed the idea of turning computing power into a utility like water and electricity to provide users with the idea of cloud computing. Half a century has passed, and people have imagined whether this concept can be applied to the manufacturing industry, allowing users to use manufacturing resources and manufacturing capabilities like water, electricity, and gas. Therefore, the concept of "cloud manufacturing" was born.

What exactly is cloud manufacturing? According to a survey on the CEConlines website, 69.47% of people do not know the answer. Let's take a look at the definition given by Li Bohu, an academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, in the article "Cloud Manufacturing - A New Service-Oriented Networked Manufacturing Model": "Using the network and Internet platform to organize online manufacturing resources and manufacturing capabilities according to user needs, A new model of networked manufacturing that provides users with various manufacturing services. It virtualizes and servitizes various manufacturing resources and manufacturing capabilities, conducts unified and centralized intelligent management, and provides a series of standard, standardized, and sharable Manufacturing services.”

In the past, when a manufacturing company wanted to develop a new product, it started with research and development, contacting suppliers, purchasing manufacturing equipment, and laying out sales channels. When you are ready, chances are that business opportunities are already fleeting. The cloud manufacturing model means that enterprises do not need to search for providers of manufacturing collaboration services, but only need to submit demands to the cloud manufacturing platform, and the cloud platform organizes manufacturing resources and manufacturing capabilities to complete design, processing, production, and collaboration. Awaiting order. In this way, it is very convenient for users to use cloud manufacturing services.

Fang Zhigang, Technical Director of Siemens PLM Software Greater China Pre-sales, simply believes that "cloud manufacturing is e-commerce in manufacturing". Wang Jian, vice president of UFIDA Software Co., Ltd. agreed with this idea: "In the past, transactions between enterprises and customers, including transaction management and settlement management, were all able to realize e-commerce. For example, e-procurement, related to suppliers. Bidding and price comparison are all electronic procurement. The current cloud manufacturing is to penetrate the form of e-commerce into the entire production process of the manufacturing industry, decompose the production process, and then crowdsource it to online manufacturing resources or manufacturing capacity providers , service providers, from outsourcing to crowdsourcing, this is actually a process of qualitative change." "If 'e-commerce' is the manifestation of cloud manufacturing, then collaborative manufacturing is the essence of cloud manufacturing." President of Dawning Information Industry Co., Ltd. Li Jun said. He believes that cloud manufacturing is a new model and method of collaborative manufacturing formed by relying on information technology, the core of which is efficient collaboration.

Disrupting manufacturing?

Let companies conduct bidding and price comparison with people or organizations with design, manufacturing, procurement, marketing resources and capabilities, just like shopping in an electronic mall, so as to complete product design, production and marketing in the shortest time. . This will be a subversion to the one-stop all-inclusive approach of large factories and large enterprises in the past. Li Jun said that in the past model of large factories, a few or hundreds of products could not be produced because the cost was too high, but the current consumer demand is moving towards differentiated, multi-variety, small batch, and fast transformation. direction development. In such a development process, the social division of labor will be further intensified, and a large number of very professional, but relatively small-scale studios will emerge. Although the manufacturing chain is separated, the efficiency is still improved because of the overall synergy. Imagine, if someone puts forward a product requirement on the cloud manufacturing platform, there will be a design and manufacturing small enterprise or small workshop to respond immediately. After communication and price comparison, a suitable object is selected to establish a production contract. The process may only take a few seconds. clock time.

Now in the textile, clothing, leather, ceramics, furniture and other industries in Foshan, Guangdong, the application of the cloud manufacturing model is being explored. In these industries in Foshan, the distribution of resources is very uneven, some companies have too much work to complete, and some companies do not. So they began to explore unified orders by region, and then distribute them to different companies, forming an orderly division of labor and supporting cooperation in the entire region. And companies that can't finish the list can send out contracts to other companies to complete them together. This model requires a public platform, and this platform is the so-called "industry cloud".

"The concept of cloud manufacturing came into being." Li Jun said that the specialized division of labor will only become more and more refined in the future. There are many small design studios with good ideas, but due to funding Problem, it may not even be able to afford design software. To this end, it hopes to share these "equipment" with people, which needs to be realized on an information platform through the "cloud" collaborative method. People or businesses that own design software can "rent" them out when they're not in use, making equipment more efficient. In the past, "collaboration" between enterprises required phone calls and meetings, which were all transaction costs. If there is a "cloud" platform, the efficiency of collaboration will be greatly improved. Wang Jian believes that a very important point of cloud manufacturing is to virtualize manufacturing resources, so that manufacturing resources can be easily used by more people.

"In the future industrial system, it must go in two directions, one is further centralization, standardization, and large-scale replication. There is also a personalized one that goes to the other extreme, with the help of cloud Computing and cloud manufacturing platforms can solve the problem of intermediate transaction costs." Li Jun said. In the future, corporate giants will not be defined by size, but by specialization. For example, in Germany, where the manufacturing industry is developed, the social division of labor is extremely strong, and the company may be small, but it has achieved the best in the world. Li Jun believes that this model is very suitable for China's current situation. There are many small and micro enterprises in China, and their direction is to be the best and most professional. "Just do one thing and make it fine." Fang Zhigang also It is believed that from the perspective of optimization, the entire social resources are within the scope of cloud manufacturing. The current popular mass production, the future is to miniaturize, turning the super factory into a small independent production unit.

Manufacturing as a Service

Perhaps a first look at the "private cloud" composed of enterprise networks can help us understand the role of "cloud" in "cloud manufacturing". In the platform built by Siemens PLM (product life cycle management software), everyone involved in product development can get all kinds of information they need anytime and anywhere to complete the design together. For example, General Motors has 28 R&D centers around the world, with a total of more than 20,000 engineers. Using cloud technology, these engineers can be online at the same time and coordinate their work in an orderly manner. They complete design tasks, deliver, and get some evaluations in the system, and then quickly feedback design revisions to others through simulation and virtual testing, so as to effectively utilize the resources of more than 20,000 engineers and improve overall decision-making efficiency. “This is revolutionary for the speed and variety of development. It used to take an average of at least 38 months to launch a new model, but with the PLM solution, it only takes seven days to design a new model, and it’s a racing car. " Fang Zhigang said. At the same time, the digital data created can help companies identify design problems during the virtual verification stage and make early solutions.

The participants in the cloud manufacturing system include manufacturing resources, capability providers, operators of manufacturing cloud, and manufacturing resources and capability users. Dawning, which has computing and storage advantages, belongs to the builders of infrastructure in cloud manufacturing platforms. They have built SME service platforms in some industrial cities. Enterprises can connect to some financing businesses, entrepreneurial projects, etc. through this portal. For example, each small and medium-sized enterprise can customize and display its own financing status and needs to the financing service platform according to the standard, and the financial service resources on the platform and the small and medium-sized enterprises are in a two-way selection way. The means of rapid matching and docking. There are also through the enterprise information platform, enterprises can sell, lease software and so on. Of course, this model is not a complete cloud manufacturing, but the concept of collaboration and service is the same. "The complexity of cloud manufacturing lies in the fact that different people have to work together in different parts of the world to make a design and complete the manufacture of a product, which requires the addition of various service systems, including logistics, banking, etc." Army said.

Compared with the private cloud of enterprises, cloud manufacturing based on public cloud emphasizes the integration of manufacturing resources and manufacturing capabilities among enterprises, improves the utilization rate of manufacturing resources and manufacturing capabilities in the whole society, and realizes the utilization of manufacturing resources and capabilities. trade. The cloud manufacturing service platform resource provider can provide the platform with the remaining or idle manufacturing resources and capabilities of the enterprise, and realize transactions through the cloud manufacturing platform to obtain profits. And resource users buy or rent software and equipment on demand for manufacturing. Operators of cloud manufacturing platforms collect service fees by providing services to the first two. "So, cloud manufacturing is a concept of a service network, changing the one-to-one model between enterprises in the past into one-to-many, manufacturing as a service." Fang Zhigang said.

Intelligent Service Network

Fang Zhigang pointed out that to improve efficiency and complete mass production tasks or customization requires the "intelligence" of the service network. Cloud manufacturing includes three aspects: factory intelligence, product intelligence and material intelligence. In the future, various resource allocation decisions of cloud manufacturing will not be done by humans, but by computers and intelligent devices. The Internet plus the Internet of Things constitute a service network. In Germany, cloud manufacturing is one of the models within the Industry 4.0 system. In the era of Industry 4.0, products, data source transmission systems and transmission tools together constitute a Cyber-Physical Convergence System (CPS). The virtual world is linked with objects in the real world. They are accustomed to comparing production activities to a large market where machines provide services and exchange information with products in real time. The German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) has created a smart factory with 20 industrial and research partners, including Siemens, to demonstrate how cyber-physical systems work in real-world applications. The pilot plant uses soap bottles to demonstrate how the product communicates with the manufacturing machine: Each empty soap bottle has a radio frequency identification (RFID) tag on the bottom to tell the machine whether it should be fitted with a black or white cap . In other words, products in this manufacturing process carry digital product memory from the start and can communicate with their surroundings via wireless signals. In this way, the product becomes a cyber-physical system that merges the real and virtual worlds into one. Just as today's USB ports can be used to connect different types of devices to a computer, in the future, field devices, machines, and other devices can be connected to production systems for seamless interaction.

However, in this process, the integration of digital or information systems becomes the key. For example, how does the machine know how many soap bottles need white caps and how many need black caps? How does the machine know if the factory has a sufficient number of caps, or is able to deliver a sufficient number of caps on time? Is there a sufficient number of staff in the warehouse to receive the goods? Today, all this information is kept in different systems. For example, an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system manages material physics, personnel planning, and costing, while a manufacturing execution system (EMS) controls production operations. The problem is that the many different formats, operating systems, and programming languages used by these disparate systems prevent the smooth and complete transfer of data between systems—which is necessary to bring the real and virtual worlds together of.