BACK
Reporter: Wang Fei Time: 2014-11-07 00:13
On November 4, the 16th China International Industry Fair (briefed as CIIF 2014) opened in Shanghai. Have a look at the eight major professional exhibitions at the fair: Metalworking & CNC Machine Tools Show, Industrial Automation Show, Environmental Protection Technology & Equipment Show, Information & Communication Technology Show, Energy Show, New Energy Auto Show, Robotics Show and Scientific & Technological Innovation Show, the five-day international industrial pageant unveiled for us China’s Version of Industry 4.0 – “The Fourth Industrial Revolution”.
Industrial Transformation Steps into Critical Period
“Industry is the leading sector of the national economy and the real economy, which serves as the base of a rich and powerful country.” Miao Xu, Minister of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) pointed out in his opening remarks at CIIF 2014, “As far as the overall industry is concerned, we must attach great importance to the deepen integration of industrialization and informationization and take intelligent manufacturing as the main direction and major task. We must spare no effort to promote the integration, comprehensive application and fusion innovation of the information technology, promote the digital, intelligent, networked development of the manufacturing industry, expedite the transformation and upgrade of the industry and turn the industry from scale to power.”
As a major sector of the national economy, China’s industry is at the critical intersection for transformation, and economic downturn, excess production capacity and profit decline are the urgent problems to be solved. The latest data show that in October, the PMI of China’s manufacturing industry went down once again, decreasing from September’s 51.1% to the present 50.8%, a record low since this May. Everbright Securities stated that after the seasonal investigation, the percentage continued to fall, signaling the momentum of economic growth is not strong.
Besides, among the industries with excess production capacity, the steel industry is experiencing the most serious situation. According to the data of the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), the steel price continued to fall during the first three quarters. In September, the composite index of the steel prices in domestic market averaged 87.96, down 3.21 points from last month and down 13.42 points year-on-year. But the production value still improves; during the first three quarters, the steel output registered 83,853 tons, growing 5 percent which 6.7 percent lower. The transformation and upgrading of the steel industry has reached a urgent point.
Under such serious status quo, a sharp question was put forward at CIIF 2014 – “how to turn Made in China into Intelligent Manufacturing in China”, aiming to push forward the transformation and upgrading of China’s industrial development. In such case, the Industry 4.0 comes into existence. The so-called 4.0 concept originated from the 2011 Hannover Messe, whose initial aim was to improve Germany’s manufacturing level through the media like the Internet of Things. After that, Germany set up the “Industrie 4.0 Working Group” and released in April of 2013 a report entitled Securing the Future of German Manufacturing Industry: Recommendations for Implementing the strategic initiative INDUSTRIE 4.0.
According to the introduction of the relevant experts from Shanghai Municipal Commission Of Economy and Informatization, the invention of steam engines and introduction of machinery manufacturing equipment in the 18th century belonged to the 1.0 era; in the 20th century, the electric power was popularized and mass production lines were introduced, this being Industry 2.0; and in the 1970s, the first Programmable controller came into being and the primary automated production started, which brought the humans into the Industry 3.0 era.
In Germany, the academic circle and the industrial world both interpret the “Industry 4.0” as the Fourth Industrial Revolution directed by the intelligent manufacturing following mechanization, electrification and information technology. In this era, through the combination of information communication technology and virtual network/ Cyber-Physical System (CPS), the manufacturing industry will transform towards the intelligent manufacturing and the centralized control will transform into the decentralized and enhanced control, and finally a highly-flexible individualized and digitalized product and service production mode will take shape.
Under the background of economic downturn and excess production surplus, China’s economic industries urgently need transformation and upgrading, and it’s the historic mission of China to take advantage of the fourth industrial revolution. “The fusion of industry and information is the only road to take in the 4.0 era. Both the Industry 4.0 Strategy advanced by the German Government and the ‘12th Five-year Plan’ of Chinese Government stress the importance of the fusion of industry and information,” Miao Xu stated.
Just in the past October, Li Keqiang, Premier of the State Council visited Germany and announced that China and Germany will cooperate in the field of “Industry 4.0”, which means enormous opportunity for Chinese enterprises and the new direction for both countries to cooperate in future industrial ties.
Customized Production Becomes a Trend
New era will bring along new phenomenon. The most direct change of industrial revolution is production mode. Rui Mingjie, Director of the Department of Industrial Economics of Fudan University pointed out, “One of the differences between Industry 4.0 and Industry 3.0 is the latter features automation while the former features intelligence. The entire production system sends different information according to different manufacturing objects: Automation generates large-scale and standard products while Intelligence brings along individualized products.
At CIIF 2014, almost all the products from both Chinese and overseas enterprises reflected the development traits of Industry 4.0. “The factory will produce whatever you want.” The business executive of SAP exhibited their simulative and full automatic production line transported from Germany to the CIIF pavilion, “Even if you just want one piece, the factory will produce for you, and this is the development trend of future manufacturing.”
As “the world’s largest corporate management solutions provider” and the core enterprise to practice Industry 4.0 in Germany, SAP Company made its debut at CIIF. The said company displayed on the spot how to interconnect and integrate all the production-related processes like the information management system, streamline, robots, equipment, products and monitoring into a complete intelligent manufacturing network through the solutions like SAP, ERP, manufacturing execution system, manufacturing integration & intelligence and workshop connectors.
“Industry 4.0 includes two features. The first is large number of batches with small quantities, satisfying the individualized demands through customized production; and the second is intelligence,” the business executive of SAP told the reporters. It’s reported that this set of advanced intelligent production solutions was also exhibited at Hannover Messe.
Meanwhile, Chinese enterprises also start to join the “Industry 4.0” trend. For example: As Asia’s No.1 and the world’s No.3 energy system solutions provider, TBEA has brought about a full set of 3D virtual multimedia human-machine interactive system based on the advanced industrial concept of “Industry 4.0”. This world’s highest-level system fully displays TBEA’s systematic solutions representing the world’s energy sector, including the prospects and systematic application of the mankind’s future clean energies, the construction capacities of China in ultra-high voltage, large-scale thermal power, hydropower, nuclear power and clean energy as well as hi-tech energy-saving wires.
Local enterprises in Shanghai are also chasing after the trend of “Industry 4.0”. “If you want a black pencil and order it online, the instruction will be transmitted to the pencil-producer immediately without any intermediary process. This machine can produce five colors of pencils but it only generates a black one when it gets the order,” Chen Jun, General Manager of Shanghai Mingjiang Intelligent System Co., Ltd interpreted “Industry 4.0” with a simple analogy. Report has it that the “Industry 4.0” streamline for “Evoque” dashboard which Shanghai Mingjiang Intelligent System Co., Ltd customizes for the supporting service provider of Land Rover Changzhou has been put into operation. Chen Jun stated that if they use the traditional streamlines, then over 100 production lines will be needed for Evoque, but if “Industry 4.0” is employed, then one production line with clear configuration models is enough to generate dashboards in different classes and features.
“Individualized customization improves the production flexibility” becomes the new slogan of all the enterprises. At this year’s industrial fair, the concept of “digital manufacturing” put forward by Siemens indicates that all the products and solutions can achieve seamless integration and cover the full life cycle and value chain of the production, making the production and management of the manufacturing enterprises more efficient, flexible and rapid.
When explaining the advantages the digital manufacturing will bring to the manufacturers, Wang Haibin, Executive Vice President of Siemens Ltd., China and General Manager of the Siemens Digital Factory Division said, “Digital manufacturing means the production unit and process have their ‘digital copies’ in their virtual production world. Therefore, enterprises can simulate and calculate on production and make the virtual and realistic production world connected. This will help the manufacturing enterprises improve their productivity considerably, shorten their products’ time to market and promote their production flexibility.”
From the British Watt’s steam engine renovation to present time, the human beings have experience three industrial revolutions whose representative technologies were steam power, electrical technology and info-tech. The three revolutions have completely changed the production means of the human society, while the fourth industrial revolution triggered by Industry 4.0 has just begun.
69 Universities Showcased Their Accomplishments at CIIF
On November 4, the 16th China International Industry Fair opened in Shanghai. The fair attracted 69 institutions of high education, in which 17 from Shanghai, 43 from the other places of China and 9 from overseas. Among the 670 university projects showcased at the fair, 61 projects belonged to the major technical achievement projects winning National Science and Technology Award, National Technological Invention Award, Provincial and Ministerial-level Scientific and Technological Progress Award and above-the-first-prize Technological Invention Award; and 609 were projects with high sci-tech content, mature technology, strong applicability and industrial convertibility.
At the said fair, the “Precision Grinding Technology and Series of Intelligent Equipment of Large High Hard Special Surface” from Shanghai Jiaotong University staged a pose. According to the introduction, processing the high-end parts and components used in the fields like aviation and aerospace and military equipment requires special material with high hardness; for that purpose the interface requirements are also strict and the curve precision grinding entails meticulous handling. Such technology of Shanghai Jiaotong University can effectively solve the above problems and has better commercial and application prospects. From 2012 to 2014, the relevant enterprise has reaped 1.53 billion yuan of direct economic returns and the newly-added profit and tax recorded 390 million yuan. The said project has applied for 22 items of invention patents and software copyrights in which 14 items have won invention patents and 2 items have obtained software copyrights.
Similarly, Fudan University’s participated project “10-kilowatt high-power ultraviolet LED photo-curable system” plays extensive roles in the photo-curable fields like printing and coatings. The high-power ultraviolet system can greatly improve the production efficiency of massive products and decrease pollution in the process of production. However, heat dissipation is the problem. Fudan University has solved such a problem and created the 10-kilowatt high-power ultraviolet LED photo-curable system. The project has independent intellectual property rights and the ultra-violet LED photo-curable system products of the cooperating enterprises have been applied in the industries like wooden floors, printing and furniture and have generated 60 million yuan of output value in 2013. This project is presently on the stage of rapid development.
It’s reported that this year’s industrial fair will be equipped with an exhibition zone specially set up for the innovation and entrepreneurship projects of college students. Up to now, 10 projects have been selected to participate in the exhibition, like the “integral solution for smart cities on information display” from East China University of Science and Technology, the “intelligent beverage dispensing equipment” from Shanghai University and the “promotion and application of modified corncob absorption materials” from Shanghai Ocean University.
The Eye-catching Robots
As an important symbol to measure a country’s hi-tech innovation and high-end manufacturing, the robotic industry has attracted high attention of the world. The major economies have treated the development of robots as their national strategies and have treated it as an important means to maintain and re-gain their competitiveness in the manufacturing industry. They are now rushing to grab the markets and the technological high ground. As the high-end symbol of intelligence, robots have always been the focus of the fairs. This year’s robots pavilion was more boisterous.
Waving their deft “hands”, the robots were “getting the threads through the eyes of the needles” together with the workers. Different from the past performance with the robots and the workers only sticking to their posts, the two-arm robot “YuMi” manufactured by ABB Engineering (Shanghai) Co., Ltd was communicating and exchanging ideas with the human beings in a friendly way. This is a type of human-machine coordinating robot to be debuted at China Industrial Fair. Chen Yueshan, Manager of the company’s marketing department, said the English “YuMi” is a shorter form of “you and me”, signaling the perfect combination and harmonious co-existence of robots and human beings.
The reporter saw at the spot that the little “YuMi” had two deft arms wrapped with soft materials and equipped with force sensing technology. When the robot’s two arms sensed the presence of the staff beside, they would draw back and change directions. Human-machine coordination is not only a highlight at the robot show but also the development direction of the future. Robots are being developed towards the direction of “small but powerful” and “clever and useful”. However, in this process, the automation of robots is often viewed as the “prime culprit” to grab workers’ jobs.
The experts believe that in the short run, robots are likely to grab away some job opportunities which will result in downsizing, but in the long run and taking the overall situation into consideration robots will not grab the job opportunities, but will instead create large numbers of jobs. In the future, human beings will still have some advantages irreplaceable by robots, and the future world will need the coordination of human beings and robots for innovation and creation.
How to realize the perfect fusion of robots and production is a puzzle for the industries to seek breakthroughs for. Delta Group – the global power management and thermal management solutions provider exhibited for the first time at the industrial fair Delta SCARA industrial robots. It’s reported that the SCARA industrial robots are not only superior in speed, precision, linearity and verticality, but also equipped with compliance control functions similar to sensors. No doubt the robots can improve the production efficiency of the industrial production lines.
Delta’s business executive told the reporters that SCARA industrial robots can be widely applied to fields like work-piece processing and irregular figure curve processing, as in the work of plug-ins, assembly, adhesive and soldering. Delta has successfully introduced the SCARA industrial robot system into the electronic and electric motors production line so that they coordinate with the visual identification system to maintain high production efficiency and greatly improve the ratio of quality products.
In China’s manufacturing industry, robots are displaying great vitality. Foxconn, an OEM for Apple iPhone announced that it was planning to deploy one million robots on the assembly line to replace the repetitive manual operation of manual workers. Stäubli Mechatronic, a company specializing in the manufacturing of industrial robots witnessed an increase in order by 40-50% annually. Prying the industrial transformation with robots will probably become a landscape of Industry 4.0. With the ever-increasing maturity of artificial intelligence technology, the robots have changed the traditional production mode, considerably improved the production efficiency, created the new industries and transformed the traditional ones.
At the recently-held 3rd China International Summit of Robotics, Wang Weiming, Vice Director of the Department of Equipment Industry of MIIT introduced to us that in 2013, the sales volume of China’s industrial robots recorded 36,860 numbers, a growth of 41 percent year on year. “China has surpassed Japan to become the world’s largest robots market. Up to 2017, the number of robots sold in China’s robots market will hit 100,000, and the overall possessing capacity of industrial robots will exceed 400,000.” Wang Weiming said.
The development of robots is being seen as a national strategy. On November 3, Su Bo, Vice Minister of MIIT said the Ministry would formulate China’s robot technology roadmap and the “13th Five Year” Plan for the robots industry. Experts pointed out that the era of robots is just round the corner; and above all, the intelligent robots would be the most promising emerging industry in the new round of development, therefore, the investment opportunity will exist in the long run.
Although the market prospect is tempting, there are still many problems to be alert with. Currently, the robots from the foreign robot companies are taking an obvious monopoly position. China’s robots industry is still facing a series of problems like weak self-owned brands, backward R&D status of core parts and components and surplus of low-end production capacity, and its conversion rate of technical achievements is only about 3 per cent.
Wang Ruixiang, President of China Machinery Industry Federation stated, “Our product quality is still not high, our product life not long and our brands not so popular. The principal reason lies in the lack of core competitiveness. Especially in the core technologies and key parts like decelerators and controllers, we still have obvious distance compared with the world’s advanced level in the areas of precision, reliability and stability. The high-end key parts and components still need to be imported.”
Create Intelligent Life
The development of industries is for the purpose of changing people’s life and letting people benefit from their wisdom and making the life better. Taking a look at the industrial revolutions, the human beings have constantly been breaking their life limits. What will the Industry 4.0 bring to each of us? Creating a more intelligent life is the answer. At the current industrial fair, future imaginations in the science fictions are becoming realities. What is more significant for the development of human beings is “Industry 4.0” will aim to solve a series of ever-serious social problems like smog attacks and traffic congestions.
Trains “floating” in the air seems to be the special-effect scene in the films, but people can witness this at the industrial fair. The reporter could see on the spot: the compartments on the exhibition stands are transparent and suspended on the sky rails, full of sci-fi touches. The introduction reads that sky rail is a new-type transportation featuring light weight, medium speed and medium capacity and it belongs to a type of suspended mono-rail transportation system. Its modern appearance and features are more suitable for Shanghai. The trains are created from high-performance and environment-friendly materials, adding a brand-new digitalized interactive experience.
The reporter learned that presently, the said project is undergoing feasibility study in multiple administrative districts and business districts in Shanghai. If the relevant study passes, then the redesigned sky train project will become the new landmark and urban landscape in downtown Shanghai.
Seen from the information application in the transportation field, the intelligent technology is changing the cities. In recent years, various cities in China are pushing the creation of “smart city” and are advocating the creation of energy-saving, environment-friendly and convenient smart living, but there still exist a lot of blind spots. Ye Zheng, Vice President of ZTE told the reporter that the wisdom of smart cities come from the large quantities of data mining and application in the industries like transportation, population and environment monitoring.
“As the current data information is not open and not shared, a lot of smart cities are still staying on the primary stage of smart cities – digital cities, which means although these departments and industries have accumulated large quantity of basic and operational dada, they have no way to interconnect. So breaking such “information island” will become the key to upgrade the wisdom of future cities,” Ye Zheng stated. It’s learned that the “Around-Nanjing Moat” system developed and researched by ZTE on the big data platform was put into service during Nanjing Youth Olympics Games and helped with the smooth operation of Nanjing City and the various pavilions in the face of short-term large population flow and vehicle flow.
The establishment of smart cities stems from each detail. “PRONA”, the name for smart street lamps exhibited at this year’s industrial fair has brought the intelligent technology to the corners of the smart city. The upper part of “PRONA” adopts a new-type high-power LED area light, with the top of the lamp base equipped with solar photovoltaic power generation device, micro base station and video probe device; the middle part adopts the multimedia information release screen system, which is able to replace ads and urban public information according to different time and places; and the bottom is the interactive screen divided into such four information systems like communities, commercial circles, scenic spots and parks, providing real-time information and convenience service according to different demands.
“PRONA is the CityPad of a smart city. Just click it and the applications of the smart city will be realized,” Li Yaoxin, Director of Shanghai Municipal Commission of Economy and Informationization described. It integrates the functions like photovoltaic power generation, LED lighting, micro base station, city video probe, multimedia advertising and information release, with the hardware implantable, software stackable and applications extendable. “If put into use in an all-round way, the millions of street lamps in Shanghai will not only generate enormous energy-saving effect, but will also become the urban information platform, blending into the information interaction system and urban grid management system,” Li Yaoxin introduced.
In the promotion of the new “Industry 4.0” intelligent technologies, current social problems will be easily solved, but what cannot be ignored is the realization of smart living still faces some barriers. The intelligent industry has been developing for about ten years in China, but generally speaking, it is still on the primary stage. According to insider’s analysis, it holds in store a huge market but lacks a complete industrial standard; and in terms of consumption, most consumers are not very familiar with smart homes and intelligent transportation and in people’s minds, some intelligent products are still expensive, gaudy and unstable.
Experts hold the view that the trend of human beings’ stride into smart living is irreversible. Standard, cost, technology and consumer base are the bottlenecks that inhibit the explosive development of the intelligent industry.
http://www.shfinancialnews.com/xww/2009jrb/node5019/node5025/userobject1ai136599.html
沪公网安备 31010602000334号
