German push-and-pull technology makes factories no longer have workers

October 27, as the world's leading industrial manufacturing power, Germany is now closely following the digital revolution trend, leveraging the latest technology to occupy the future development of industrial manufacturing opportunities.

The Siemens factory in Bavaria, Germany's eastern city of Amberg (Amberg), is an early case of a fully automated, internet-based Intelligent factory developed by the German government, companies, universities and research institutions.

The main task of the 100,000-square-foot factory is to produce automation equipment for other industrial giants, but that is not the key, and its significance lies in how the 1000 manufacturing units in the plant are contacted through the network. Through network control, most of the equipment in the plant can be separated from the human labor force to select and assemble parts.

Vauvregans Wallstedt (Wolfgang Wahlster), chairman of the Integrated Project Industrial 4.0 (Industrie 4.0), which Germany has built up, says that such a smart factory can make the product fully automated: semi-finished products on the assembly line will tell What the machine needs to serve ", and then the machine automatically assembles the finished product according to the information.

The initiative was designed to help Germany's working manufacturing industry maintain its competitive edge in response to the labour cost advantages of manufacturing in developing countries and a resurgent manufacturing sector in the United States.

Intelligent Factory

The so-called intelligent factory, its technical core is the Internet of things. As the trend of science and technology development in the future, IoT is being paid more and more attention by technology companies. Earlier this year, Google (Weibo) spent 3.2 billion of billions of dollars on acquisitions of smart home equipment maker Nest Labs, a massive foray into consumer-networking.

Now, Germany's industrial manufacturing is also pinning the future on the technology of IoT. Although this kind of intelligent factory is still in the pilot stage, but the German artificial intelligence Research Center has cooperated with many German enterprises, and has made many most advanced achievements in this field.

The German artificial Intelligence Research Center conducted a pilot activity at the factory in Kaiserslautern, the chemical giant Basf (BASF), which produced shampoo and hand sanitizer that was fully automated.

In the test, people through the network, the empty hand sanitizer bottle on the assembly line with the RFID tag will automatically connect with the production machine, tell the machine its required product types, flavor, cap color and trademarks. On such an assembly line, two adjacent bottles of hand sanitizer may be completely different products.

The experiment relies on the "dialogue" between machines and products through wireless networks, while Labor pays for sample orders.

Siemens has demonstrated the potential of the current intelligent plant at the Amberg Automation plant. The plant is dedicated to the production of automated machines for BASF, Bayer, Daimler, BMW and other German industrial companies and their many overseas rivals.

After 25 years of digital development, the plant's automation operation has reached about 75%, and its 1150 employees are mainly engaged in computer operations and production process monitoring.

It may take another 10 years to design an automatic intelligent manufacturing system based on internet, but Siegfried Russworm, director of Siemens, said: "We have building blocks." ”

In addition to Amberg, many German companies are preparing to test water for intelligent manufacturing, including a Wittenstein group (Wittenstein) and Bosch's new hydraulic assembly line, scheduled to start operations in Humboldt this fall.

Digital economy

Germany's march into the industrial Internet is largely the result of America's growing unease over the dominance of the Internet. According to the network data portal Statista statistics, Google currently handles 95% of German internet search. Google's ubiquitous clout could pose a threat to German industrial companies trying to use the Internet to build more service-oriented business models.

Günther Schuh, a member of the German National Academy of Science and Engineering at the 4.0 project, said he noted that German industry was genuinely concerned about the dominance of companies like Amazon and Google, which control the combination of consumer and business.

Beyond the hype of email, word processing, and cloud computing software, Google may also use its search engine dominance to promote its products and services. For example, the company is in the early stages of research and development of automated driving technology.

In addition, the electronics giant Amazon will not be limited to the Internet retail industry, it has moved towards consumer electronics, tablet Kindle Fire and smartphone Fire Phone is a good example.

In response, Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, has long warned that German companies will remain competitive in the digital economy. Sigmar Gabriel, Germany's economy and energy minister, also sees the danger of letting US companies such as Google dominate the Internet data business.

In a debate earlier this month with Eric Schmidt, Google's chairman, Mr Gabriel said: "The big data needed to work on the Industrial 4.0 project is not collected by German companies, but by the four technology companies in Silicon Valley." That's exactly what I'm worried about. ”

German entrepreneurs seem to be bullish, compared with the worries of senior German officials. Peter Herweck, CEO of Siemens automation industry and driving group, Hevik that Google's dominance in the internet would not pose a threat to Siemens ' digital manufacturing projects, and that perhaps two companies could co-operate.

Government support

Over the years, German enterprises in the production technology has been in a leading position. Now they are supported by the Government to maintain this advantage.

Industry 4.0 is a popular public-private partnership project favoured by the German government. Instead of offering subsidies to pick winners, the German government has offered € 200 million in funding to support research and development, creating new technologies and networking opportunities for companies to create unified standards, using large public research institutions to help companies carry out research and development efforts.

Meanwhile, the Obama administration in the United States is trying to emulate the German-style research network, which last year allocated more than $2.2 billion trillion to support manufacturing projects across the United States.

Several technology giants, including GE, At&t, Cisco, Intel and IBM, set up an industrial Internet alliance this March. Similar to Industry 4.0 projects, the nonprofit alliance is intended to provide framework support for corporate and university researchers to create standards and best samples of Internet industrial applications.

(Responsible editor: Mengyishan)