Quality Alchemist (品質煉金術師): HKPC Seminar on Stepping into Smart Manufacturing with AI

2018年9月28日星期五

HKPC Seminar on Stepping into Smart Manufacturing with AI

The seminar named “Stepping into Smart Manufacturing with AI” was organized by HKPC on 28^th Sep 2018. Today’s consumers pursue customized, personalized, and unique products over standardized ones in the past. We are looking for digitalization, automation, machine learning, computer vision, and other fields of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to meet the current dynamic market needs and keep abreast of the new industrial trends for business sustainability. This seminar gave insights of how to move forward to Smart Manufacturing and appropriate application. I met one of speaker - Dr. Alvin LAI (Director, Leo Paper Group) and I proposed to send some research students for practice industrial big data analysis. Then we took a photo for memory.

The first speaker was Mr. Ken Lam (Senior Consultant, i4.0 & Additive Manufacturing, HKPC) and his topic named “Trend & Overview of Industry 4.0 & Smart Manufacturing”. Firstly, he briefed the global industrial trend that included information trend, technology trend and market trend. He also reviewed the evolution of industrial revolution.

Then he briefed the definition of Industrie 4.0 from acatech (Nation Academy of Science and Engineering, German). It is a new level of organization and control over the entire value chain of the life cycle of products for increasing individualized customer requirements.

After that Mr. Lam introduced the Framework of Industry 4.0 from Fraunhofer IPT. It named Smart i4.0 Navigator. Four technical perspectives were Sensor, Network, Data and HMI (Human Machine Interface).

HKPC employed acatech Industrie 4.0 maturity index and developed HKPC i4.0 recognition programme through five steps below:

i) Evaluation of i4.0 maturity level

ii) i4.0 certified training

iii) i4.0 strategic roadmap identification

iv) i4.0 Pilot Project Implementation

v) Smart Operation & Manufacturing Recognition

One of key management tools for i4.0 was Lean and then Mr. Lam introduced the Digital Lean Service that was data driven for process optimization. Finally, Mr. Lam said there were more than 30 enterprises under industry 4.0 migration and 2 of them would acquire level 1i recognition in 2018.

The second speaker was Dr. Alvin Lai (Director, OEM Business & Operations, Leo Paper Group) and his presentation entitled “Road to Smart Manufacturing”. In the beginning, he briefed Leo Group history since 1982. He gave some data that they had staff 28,000 in 2008 and then down to 16,000 staff in 2018 but the productivity increase 40% compared with 2008.

They faced different challenges in four dimensions that were technology rapid change (e.g. AI/AR), policy environment (e.g. US-China trade war), Supply Chain changing and OEM successor problem. Dr. Lai said their strategies to enhance the competitive edge in three directions included competence of operation, business and manufacturing.

Dr. Lai reviewed the world industry transformation strategies. Then he shared his digital transformation roadmap.

Reference to i4.0, there were vertical and horizontal integration using different IT technologies and involved the whole supply chain.

He shared some projects in his company such as no human factory.

At the end, he proposed the Leagile Manufacturing included AI data decision, automation, CPS, etc.

The third speaker was Mr. Ken Law (CEO, MotherApp) and his topic was “Using Artificial Intelligence (AI) to analyze shop floor operation in real time”. Firstly, Mr. Law introduced his company which transformed from App company to AI service company.

Mr. Law briefed the technology trend form AI, Machine Learning and Deep Learning.

Then he demonstrated some projects using visual and AI analytics to identify quality problem through CCTV monitoring in the factory.

After teaching the AI programming (about 50000 photos), it was able to identify the problem and made analysis in real time.

Video demonstration was showed.

Finally, Mr. Law introduced the coming WeChat Support in their service.

The last speaker was Mr. Thomas Cheung (PowerAI Business Development Manager, IBM China/HK Ltd.) and his topic named “IBM AI Case Sharing”. Mr. Cheung briefed our industry continued to transform through waves of change from Transactional Database to Business Intelligence to Big Data & Analytics and then to Actionable Insight in Context.

Then he mentioned four competence in the cognitive systems and they were Understand, reasoning, Learning and Interactive. And then he introduced different AI example in different industries.

In manufacturing, AI cases (e.g mobile glass and solar panel) for quality control and inspection were found more popular and much higher efficiency than human work in the past.