Red Flags in the Digital Age

In order to prevent his children from becoming "left-behind children", Huang Zheng, an architect of the automotive industry at Alibaba Cloud, moved his family from Shenzhen to Changchun. In his words, "This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, and this is what I have always wanted to do."

Wang Biao is Huang Zheng's partner and a native of Changchun. Both are veterans in the automotive industry, but both agree that "there is no precedent for doing this."

In July 2020, Alibaba Cloud and the Ninth Institute of Machinery Industry reached a strategic cooperation to jointly provide automobile companies with overall solutions for digital factories. This is what Huang Zheng and Wang Biao called "once-in-a-lifetime" and "unprecedented".

The automotive industry has a high level of automation, but overall digital solutions are still scarce in the industry.

Prior to this, Alibaba Cloud has served 70% of the country's leading automobile OEMs and travel companies, covering R&D and marketing, but this is the first time for Alibaba Cloud to go deep into the production and manufacturing of automobiles.

The first customer is FAW Hongqi’s newly built new energy vehicle factory.

In 1958, the first Hongqi car was produced at the First Automobile Works in Changchun. After experiencing ups and downs, the dynamically fluttering red flag logo has always represented the banner of China's automobile industry.

In the same year, the Ninth Institute of Machinery Industry, known as the "Cradle of Chinese Automobile Factory Design", was officially established. In the 63 years since then, the Ninth Institute of Machinery Industry has been focusing on automobile factory construction and overall automobile engineering solutions, and has served dozens of automobile OEMs at home and abroad. The Ninth Institute of Machinery Industry is present in Tesla's Shanghai factory. The Ninth Institute of Machinery Industry completed the construction of the paint shop in 97 days, significantly shortening the project cycle by half, setting an Asian record.

But this time, the mission of the Ninth Institute of Machinery Industry is different. "We delivered a truly data-driven factory to the Hongqi Prosperous Factory," said Li Yunsheng, deputy general manager of the Ninth Institute of Machinery Industry. The "prosperous" factory he mentioned is the internal name of the Hongqi New Energy Factory.

In 2018, as soon as Xu Liuping, Chairman of China FAW, took office, he released the new Hongqi brand strategy. The new Hongqi faces the development opportunities of "electrification, intelligent networking, sharing, and digitalization."

“If you want to do your work well, you must first sharpen your tools.” Thus, the prosperous factory came into being. Sixty years later, still in Changchun, the prosperous factory built by FAW with an investment of 7.8 billion yuan quietly took shape.

New energy and intelligence are the definite development trends of the automobile industry. The past and the future converge in the prosperous factory of today.

It is understood that the Hongqi Prosperous Factory is expected to be completed and put into mass production by the end of 2021. In the future, it will mainly produce Hongqi brand new energy vehicles, intelligent networked vehicles, etc., with an annual production capacity of 200,000 vehicles. Hongqi plans to launch 21 models in the next five years, including 18 new energy vehicles, accounting for more than 85%. The Prosperous Factory is an important support for the new Hongqi strategy.

FAW Hongqi is a national brand of China. Under the promotion of the strategy of building a strong country through intelligent manufacturing, FAW Hongqi is at the forefront of the digital transformation of the automotive industry and has chosen Alibaba Cloud and the Ninth Institute of Machinery to jointly create and implement it.

Wang Biao clearly remembers that after a long talk, Li Yunsheng, deputy general manager of the 9th Institute of Machinery, said firmly, "We don't want simple cooperation, we want strategic cooperation." The 9th Institute of Machinery has accumulated profound industry business capabilities over the years and is currently actively undergoing digital transformation. Alibaba Cloud's data technology and artificial intelligence capabilities can complement it. The two together will provide automotive industry customers with a new form of "digital factory."

This is a decisive battle, for Huang Zheng and Wang Biao, for the 9th Institute of Mechanical Engineering and Alibaba Cloud, and for Hongqi Automobile.

"In the past year, we have delved deeply into the automobile manufacturing process, combining the Ninth Institute's profound factory construction experience with Alibaba Cloud's data intelligence advantages, hoping to build an advanced automobile digital factory for FAW Hongqi." Jiang Zhixiong, vice president of Alibaba Cloud Intelligence and general manager of the manufacturing industry line, said at the on-site ceremony of the Hongqi Prosperous Factory's intelligent central control system in June.

Different from the previous automobile factories that were mainly based on automation, the Hongqi Prosperous Factory has established a data-oriented direction from the beginning. With data as the main line, Alibaba Cloud must first solve the problem of data collection. Industrial control is inseparable from the SCADA system (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition). The traditional SCADA products used by mainstream domestic OEMs have problems with software performance and access capacity.

"The mainstream products on the market were designed based on single-line non-flexible production scenarios 10 or 20 years ago. At that time, the degree of automation of production line equipment was not high, and the number of equipment access points was not large. The number of equipment points accessed by existing manufacturers is 20 to 30 times that of before. Traditional platforms can no longer meet the requirements of smart factories for data collection, rapid processing, and distribution." Huang Zheng said.

Alibaba Cloud and the 9th Institute of Machinery have built a self-developed SCADA system for FAW Hongqi for future smart factories, with over one million access points and a data acquisition frequency of up to 200 milliseconds. This is also the first time that a leading domestic OEM has fully adopted a self-developed SCADA system in five major workshops. This SCADA system also has openness that traditional software does not have. It can automatically produce data API services according to customer requirements. Even if you are not an automation professional, you can independently complete the development according to your needs with a low threshold, saving the factory's later operation and maintenance costs.

Alibaba Cloud and the 9th Institute of Mechanical Engineering have also jointly improved AI platform and digital twin platform products for automobile factories. Workshop workers and engineers can build a real-time 1:1 digital twin factory in the digital space through low-code "drag and drop" methods, and can also quickly develop intelligent applications based on data to achieve functions such as quality prediction, predictive equipment maintenance, and intelligent energy management and control.

When data flows in the factory, intelligence naturally emerges. In the Hongqi Digital Factory, we see a set of automotive digital factory methodologies based on data intelligence.

Looking around the industry, the application of data intelligence in automobile factories is still in its early stages, and a large amount of data has not been well utilized. Even the pioneers mainly use point-based applications and have not formed a complete system construction. One reason is insufficient data collection and governance, and the other is insufficient data value discovery tools.

"This is why we jointly built such a system. The purpose is to collect and process the data to support the construction of the entire smart factory," said Li Yunsheng.

On May 28, at the 2021 Alibaba Cloud Summit, Alibaba Cloud and the 9th Institute of Machinery Industry jointly released the "Automotive Digital Factory 1.0" industry solution, marking the maturity of digital factories and becoming a new starting point.

Huang Zheng said that Alibaba Cloud's underlying IoT data acquisition platform has achieved standardization, and the point meter configuration tool is adapted to different types of brand production equipment. Regardless of whether it is a discrete industry or a process industry, as long as there is a demand for building a digital factory, this platform can be exported.

For the data middle platform, as a tool, there are objective needs such as model governance and data development. Alibaba Cloud can maximize the value of data by combining different scenarios.

At the upper-level intelligent application level, Alibaba Cloud adopts a model of standard products plus secondary development to customize different scenarios and achieve cross-industry replication and delivery.

It can be seen that the cooperation between Alibaba Cloud and the 9th Institute of Mechanical Engineering has honed the automobile factory data middle platform, AI platform and DTwin platform for actual combat scenarios, forming a new workshop intelligent central control system.

It is between PLC and MES, focusing on data collection, data management and data intelligent application. At the same time, data processing is combined with intelligent control system to feed back to the entire intelligent control process, thereby improving efficiency, quality and reducing costs. The output data will also support the intelligent application of other information systems in various workshops in the automotive industry, such as MES and ERP, making it more convenient and effective for other systems to use data.

Times have changed. When data intelligence runs through the front and back ends of the automotive industry, the red flag of the digital age will rise again.