New breakthrough in 5G toB! The industry’s first multi-plant 5G+MEC landed!

On the 5G toB road, there is another exciting news!

Recently, the industry’s first multi-park 5G+MEC jointly built by China Unicom Group, Zhejiang Unicom, Jiangsu Unicom and Huawei has successfully landed in Hangzhou Dahe Thermomagnetic Electronics Co., Ltd. Zhejiang and Jiangsu plants. The project uses Unicom’s self-developed unified operation platform to achieve rapid business deployment on edge MECs, creating the country’s first 5G cross-domain interconnection smart park, realizing toB one-cloud intensive operation, and enabling rapid business launch.

Pay attention to the keywords “multi-plant 5G+MEC”, “unified operation platform”, and “toB one cloud intensive operation”. It can be said that this is not only an important event on the road to 5G toB, but also the landing of China Unicom’s 5G MEC strategy. A great success for.

The first multi-plant 5G+MEC landed

Hangzhou Dahe Thermomagnetic Electronics Co., Ltd. is an internationally well-known supplier of semiconductor products and solutions. It has 30 factories across the country and faces two major pain points in the digital transformation of the group company:

1. The plants are scattered and physically distant. They are located in 6 parks in Hangzhou, Zhejiang, Quzhou and Dongtai, Jiangsu. They have strong demands for multi-plant cross-regional interconnection and collaboration, unified network management, customer self-service, and business cross-domain replication.

2. The existing wired network has problems such as difficult wiring, maintenance, and upgrade; and due to the complex structure of the wired network, there are isolated islands of information between different workshops and cannot support cross-system operations, which hinders enterprises from becoming flexible and digital , Intelligent production upgrade.

In view of the cross-regional distribution of Yamato Thermal and Magnetic Plants, China Unicom and Huawei have not only built exclusive MEC resource pools in the park computer rooms at different locations, but also built a unified operation platform that can be used for edge MECs distributed in multiple regions. Carrying out overall scheduling and unified management, and at the business level, the ability of “one point opening and national copy” has been realized.

Based on this architecture, on the one hand, applications can be uniformly distributed through an intensive operation platform to achieve rapid deployment of services on edge MECs, and simultaneous delivery and online delivery of MEC services in multiple provinces and offices; on the other hand, it has established a national first for Yamato Thermal Magnetics. Zhang’s cross-provincial and cross-domain 5G industry private network can help companies realize the digital transformation goals of integrated plant network deployment, digitization of industrial equipment, standardization of factory operations, and intelligent processing.

For each cross-regional plant, in addition to deploying independent MEC resource pools in the computer rooms of the three plant areas, a shared MEC was deployed in the other two Hangzhou Binjiang plant areas to integrate business data (such as OT data acquisition traffic, Kanban access traffic) MEC performs local offload processing, and deploys a 5G wireless network with full signal coverage to connect to the terminal, which can provide nearby “connection + calculation” capabilities, greatly reducing the delay of data collection, transmission, processing and result feedback.

At the same time, in order to ensure the safety of factory data and realize the complete isolation of industrial data mining equipment from other enterprise users’ traffic, this project also uses air interface 5QI and FlexE-based transmission network slicing technology to achieve the time slot level of different OT/IT business flows. Physical isolation.

5G+MEC spawns a variety of industry applications

The successful deployment of 5G+MEC in a multi-factory scenario not only freed enterprises from the shackles of wired connections through the low-latency, large-bandwidth 5G wireless network, but also effectively solved the difficult network deployment, operation and maintenance, and upgrade difficulties in industrial production. Problems make it possible for enterprises to make flexible production; local deployment of MEC allows enterprises to use computing power and intelligence to realize real-time data processing, which promotes 5G+AI quality improvement, digital workshop, AR auxiliary maintenance, and AGV unification The deployment of abundant industry applications such as dispatching greatly improves production efficiency and product quality.

5G+AI improves quality and efficiency

In the past, in the machining process of the machine tool in the workshop, the tool was sometimes broken due to the excessive load of the tool, which caused the product to be scrapped or even crashed or caught fire, which caused a large cost loss. The load of product processing is monitored in real time, and the processing parameters are adjusted according to the real-time load through an adaptive algorithm, and the feed speed is automatically accelerated or reduced according to the load, thereby greatly improving the processing efficiency. At the same time, the process envelope curve is generated through machine learning. Once the real-time data shows that the load in the process exceeds the envelope line, a stop command is issued immediately and the cutting tool stops immediately, which greatly improves the quality of the production process and reduces the scrap rate.

Digital workshop

Traditional procedures, drawings, tool lists, and craftsmanship are all paper documents. The paperless management system digitizes and analyzes procedures, tool lists, and procedure descriptions to MBD and structure the drawings so that the information system can understand the paper. The information of the qualitative document realizes that the whole process of data can be called and traced.

The digital workshop also displays the people, machines, materials, methods, loops, etc. involved in the production workshop in the form of Kanban to realize visualization, so as to better track production elements and realize production tasks, processing procedures, tools, and tooling. In the production process, various indicators that deviate from the standard can be dynamically controlled in real time by setting rules.

“Cloud Edge Collaboration” to guide production

The production management system and edge computing are coordinated to analyze and data value mining of the mass production process data collected and stored, and realize the optimization of process-level parameters; the real-time data can be analyzed to adapt to the optimal Process parameters, and predict and alarm abnormal conditions during processing to improve processing quality and efficiency, truly achieve self-perception, self-judgment, self-decision, and self-execution, and realize the intelligence of the production process.

“5G+AR” work collaboration

In the 5G environment of the Yamato factory, after the on-site staff wear AR glasses, on the one hand, the 5G network can transmit and superimpose the real-time collected machine tool equipment status data, quality inspection data and other information in real time to the field equipment, which can help work Personnel obtain real-time information such as job data, job efficiency, job work orders, etc.; on the other hand, they can also connect remote instructors through end-to-end slicing technology to achieve remote guidance and job results confirmation as if they were on-site, or according to the system Entered work instructions for on-site operation.

Through the implementation of these applications, the project optimized the production process, improved production execution efficiency, increased equipment utilization by 8%, and tool detection system increased tool life by 10%, greatly improving the production efficiency and quality level of the enterprise. The training time for new employees has also been reduced from the original 2-3 days to the current one day by means of AR, and the efficiency has increased by more than 50%.

Install turbocharging for the digital transformation of the industry

The biggest highlight of this project is the rapid launch of the business through the integrated operation and maintenance support system of the toB cloud, which provides new solutions for the interconnection and collaboration of multi-factory, cross-province and cross-domain scenarios, rapid business replication, and unified network management. The solution greatly promotes the promotion and landing speed of 5G applications in multiple factories.

Since the commercialization of 5G, the application practice of 5G industry has mainly landed in a single park scenario, but for many large enterprises, they have multiple factories or parks distributed throughout the country and even around the world. Geographical coordination and how to achieve digital upgrades quickly and synchronously are the pain points and rigid needs before them, and this project has helped companies solve this pain point in time.

As early as April 2020, China Unicom and Huawei and other partners released the first MEC edge cloud large-scale commercial network, took the lead in completing the commercial deployment of the MEC edge cloud platform, and realized centralized management and control of edge nodes and business applications across the country. A little innovation, rapid replication across the network. The successful landing of this project not only proves the commercial capabilities of China Unicom’s MEC edge cloud platform, but also sets a benchmark for the industry, which will lead the entire industry to accelerate toB expansion and promote faster digital transformation of thousands of industries.

Yes, if the sinking of “connection + computing” capabilities is the engine that enables a variety of industry applications, then 5G+MEC under the integrated operation and maintenance support system based on toB a cloud is like giving this engine The addition of turbocharging will further accelerate 5G application innovation and scale promotion, and accelerate the digital transformation of the industry.