How Will Manufacturing Equipment under "Industry 4.0" Iterate to Develop More Intelligent Features?

With the popularization and development of Internet technology, smart phones, smart TVs, intelligent manufacturing, smart devices, etc. are frequently emerging in our lives and work. The vast majority of manufacturing enterprises are also trying to use artificial intelligence (AI) technology to improve their products and services.

According to the analysis of the data report from the National Bureau of Statistics, currently only a few manufacturing enterprises have reached the "applied intelligence" stage, where human intelligence, analytical technology, and industry insights are combined and applied on a large scale to the core business of the enterprise. Within the entire statistical scope, only 16% of enterprises have a complete artificial intelligence vision, only 5% of enterprises are investing in applying artificial intelligence technology to transform their manufacturing, and only 2% of enterprises are fully applying artificial intelligence solutions.

In addition, the report also specifically points out that artificial intelligence technology can not only promote the transformation of an enterprise's core business, but also enhance the employee and customer experience, ultimately giving rise to new business models and helping enterprises achieve the "Industry X.0" strategy. Industrial equipment manufacturers that make good use of artificial intelligence technology can increase their market value by up to 25%. Chinese manufacturing enterprises should actively break out of the traditional manufacturing framework, strive to use advanced Internet technology to truly promote the development of intelligent manufacturing, and achieve real intelligent manufacturing.

1. Increase the degree of numerical control of manufacturing equipment
   Although numerically controlled machine tools have been widely promoted and used globally, for the processing equipment in factories, the promotion mainly focuses on some "standard" machine tools, such as CNC milling machines, CNC grinding machines, and CNC lathes. For many manufacturing industries, especially those with special processing and manufacturing requirements, the numerical control of production equipment has not been well implemented. In fact, many devices are still in the traditional manual processing state, and there is much room for improvement in both processing efficiency and quality. Given the current development level of numerical control technology in the global manufacturing industry, this is quite regrettable. Therefore, for the vigorous development of non - standard intelligent equipment, more efforts should be made in research and development and layout from the aspect of numerical control, so as to truly lay the foundation for building a strong manufacturing country.

2. Incorporate more automation elements into manufacturing research, development, and production
   In addition to the numerical control transformation of equipment, Chinese manufacturing plants should also inject more automation elements into industrial manufacturing. With the disappearance of China's demographic dividend, replacing human labor with machines will become the biggest dividend in the future manufacturing industry. Industrial automation technology is an endless dividend, especially for China, which has a super - extensive but not fully developed manufacturing industry.

3. Make full use of the data transmission function of manufacturing equipment
   In this world of "Internet of Everything", it would be rather dull if manufacturing equipment is not connected to the Internet. Nowadays, numerically controlled machine tools basically provide data interfaces. Even though many factories are not yet proficient in using these interfaces, the role of such data interfaces will become increasingly prominent. Especially when building MES systems and equipment operation and maintenance information systems, these interfaces can determine the upper limit of the intelligence of manufacturing plants.

4. Enable manufacturing equipment to have intelligent sensing functions for key parts and manufacturing processes
   Achieving intelligent information feedback on key parts or key components of equipment through sensing technology will also become a standard feature of intelligent manufacturing equipment. Taking processing equipment as an example, engineers have carried out corresponding load monitoring on the X, Y, and Z feed mechanisms and the spindle unit of a processing host. When the machine is normally processing, if its operating load is 25%, the engineer will set the safe operating value of the equipment at 30%. If the load of any moving axis exceeds this value, an overload warning will be displayed, and at the same time, the processing of the machine will be stopped, and an operation report will be pushed to the engineer. The equipment can also accurately push and feedback the processing and production progress to the engineer, thereby improving the service life and operating accuracy of the equipment. With the rapid development of sensing technology, the monitoring of many intelligent manufacturing processes will become possible.

5. Make the production process of equipment nearly transparent and have "mini - MES" functions
   For factories that truly achieve intelligent manufacturing, one piece of equipment is an intelligent manufacturing unit. An intelligent manufacturing factory only needs to connect the equipment to the MES system to ensure that the MES system can interact with the information system, so that the equipment operation and maintenance data and the information data of the processed products can be truly connected, and the entire manufacturing process of the equipment can be made transparent. This will play an important role in understanding the equipment production capacity in real - time and improving the manufacturing efficiency of the factory.

The future manufacturing industry will surely be like in the movie "Iron Man". Engineers only need to communicate with their own "Jarvis", and then they can control the factory through it to produce the products they want. Intelligent technology will dominate the future!

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