Large and Small Shipyards Mobilized for Intelligent Manufacturing

Kuang Zhanting

The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) recently released a list of units and excellent scenarios for the 2021 intelligent manufacturing pilot demonstration factories, including not only large shipbuilding enterprises such as Jiangnan Shipbuilding, Guangzhou Shipbuilding International (GSI), Waigaoqiao Shipbuilding, and Dalian Shipbuilding Industry Corp. (DSIC) under CSSC, but also small and medium-sized shipbuilding enterprises such as Zhuhai Sunbird Yacht, Guangdong Kaili Boat, Jianglong Boat, and CSSC Yuanzhou Science and Technology Yinghui South.

Head shipbuilding enterprises see multi-point blossoming

GSI joined hands with Huawei to start a new process of digital transformation last year. According to the plan, Huawei's expert team will comprehensively sort out the outstanding problems in the digital transformation of GSI, put forward the long-term goals and implementation routes of informatization, and submitted an informatization planning plan. Through the implementation of this project, GSI will gradually achieve the following goals: build an enterprise data center based on the cloud computing technology architecture, realize the safe and efficient operation and rapid and agile development of business systems, and accelerate continuous business innovation; carry out application of 5G, big data, artificial intelligence, industrial Internet, virtual reality and other technologies in the enterprise; continue to promote the construction of R&D and design platform, resource integration platform, intelligent manufacturing platform and comprehensive management platform, so that each business process can achieve the necessary digital management, fully perceive the operating status of the enterprise, and through analysis, prediction, and algorithm models, assist enterprise scientific decision-making, and realize enterprise operation automation and intelligentization.

In the Longxue Shipbuilding Base on the bank of the South China Sea, from the relatively closed workshop to the open environment dock, all shipbuilding companies are actively promoting the process of intelligent manufacturing. Relying on the Shenzhen-Zhongshan Corridor Project, GSI and Huangpu Wenchong, together with CSSC Shanghai Shipbuilding Technology Research Institute (STRI) and Shanghai CSSC Lingang Ship Equipment Co., Ltd., have built "three lines and one system" -- flat segmented production line, subassembly intelligent welding line, plate/ profile cutting line transformation and upgrading project and workshop information control system, pushing the intelligent level of the production workshop to a new level. Huangpu Wenchong is building a digital dock system. They apply three-dimensional simulation embarkation technology to form a three-dimensional dock coordinate system in the virtual system through the permanent coordinates set on the dock side, unify the threedimensional coordinate system of the dock with the three-dimensional model coordinate system of the ship in the design system, and realize the rapid positioning, comparison and adjustment of the segmented embarkation through the comparison of the preset coordinate points and the actual coordinate points.

The tide of digital transformation has come, and more large shipbuilding companies are also striving to achieve upgrades in this tide.

Relying on the construction of domestic large-scale cruise ships, Waigaoqiao Shipbuilding is vigorously promoting the construction of data intelligence infrastructure, building a "digital intelligence factory", and accelerating the road of digital transformation. Different from other civilian ships, due to the strict requirements of the weight center of gravity and aesthetics of the whole ship, 80% of the cruise ship segments are 4-8 mm thin plate segments. The thin plate is very easy to deform during processing and lifting, which in turn leads to the misalignment of the hull structure, causing fire work leveling and cutting correction. Therefore, the deformation control of thin plates is the first difficulty that must be overcome in the construction of cruise ship structure. Waigaoqiao Shipbuilding has specially created the first cruise-specific thin plate intelligent production workshop in China, introduced T-BEAM assembly line equipment and 8 welding robots, innovatively adopted laser cutting, laser composite welding and other technologies, applied 5G+ machine vision, with manufacturing execution system (MES) as the core, applied the industrial Internet of Things technology to realize the intelligent control of the production line, which empowers the efficiency and precision management of the steel plate allocation and transport, cutting, processing, and segmented construction of the thin plate segment.

DSIC on the Bohai Bay is promoting the application of "5G + Industrial Internet" in shipbuilding business to boost the deep integration of advanced digital technology and the whole process of the enterprise, enhance the competitiveness and production efficiency of products and services, and achieve high-quality development. Through the 5G network pilot application project, the company has realized the network issuance of numerical control instructions in the complex on-site environment of the steel processing workshop of the steel processing company, the real-time collection of the operating status of the CNC devices, the phased production closed-loop management of massive data cleaning, statistics, analysis and display; through the segmented digital workshop upgrade project, the workshop industrial interconnection platform based on the welder has been built to realize real-time monitoring of the welding machine status, the online issuance of welding processes and work orders, the binding of welder welding machine tasks, online realtime feedback of completion status, massive data storage, data statistics, analysis and other functions. In the next step, DSIC will continue to expand the number of application equipment and extend the process application scenarios, not only to achieve small cycle closed-loop management of internal production, but also to open up the upstream and downstream data circulation at different processing stages.

At present, domestic leading shipbuilding enterprises are accelerating the progress from automation to intelligence, from design, production, management to logistics, procurement and other stages, through the research and development, introduction and application of various software and hardware facilities, effectively improve production efficiency and product quality.

SME “make-up lessons” pay off

Industry experts pointed out that the informatization foundation of head shipbuilding enterprises is relatively good, and they have better conditions for the implementation of intelligent manufacturing. For most of the small and medium-sized shipbuilding enterprises other than the head shipbuilding enterprises, how should they go on the road of intelligent manufacturing?

The digital foundation and manufacturing process control technology of small and mediumsized shipbuilding enterprises are weak, the digital production capacity is insufficient, the integration of professional information team and professional manufacturing team is not enough, the coordination of R&D, production, management, service and other processes is poor, the degree of process and coding is low, the gap between standard and safety management technology is large, and the loss of skilled workers is serious. Fang Shujia, chief expert of the Chinese Society of Naval Architects and Marine Engineers (CSNAME), believes that in general, a large number of demand from these enterprises is still making up for industry 2.0 lessons.

How to guide, supervise and help small and medium-sized shipbuilding enterprises to make up for the course of Industry 2.0 and lay a good foundation for the overall digital transformation of China's shipbuilding industry? The practice of Guangdong Shipbuilding Industry Association (GSIA) has strong reference significance. In recent years, the association has carried out the evaluation of ship production conditions and the design qualification evaluation of ship design units, promoting local shipbuilding enterprises, especially small and medium-sized shipbuilding enterprises, to practice their internal skills, improve the level of lean management, and lay a solid foundation for digital transformation.

Relying on the Guangdong Shipbuilding Industry Expert Think Tank, GSIA organized an expert research team to go deep into the scene of the shipbuilding enterprises, focusing on the five key aspects of "quality, efficiency, effectiveness, safety and environmental protection", respectively, inspected the whole process of the production workshop, indoor warehouse, indoor processing workshop, wharf, safe production, and dangerous goods warehouse, randomly checked management documents and retrieved control documents, and comprehensively reviewed the application effectiveness of basic management software. The evaluation criteria for the design qualification of ship design units are mainly divided into three levels: A, B and C from the aspects of basic conditions, professional and technical personnel, management, and technical equipment and application.

Yinghui South has firmly grasped the development direction of digital shipbuilding technology, and gradually raised the application of computer technology to the level of computer-aided design/computer-aided manufacturing (CAD/CAM) and information technology integration, applied CNC plasma cutting and other equipment and technologies to achieve control and closed loop of the control layer in terms of aluminum alloy boat manufacturing equipment; Sunbird Yacht is working towards digital transformation after having achieved the four-to-one management system of quality, environment, occupational health and energy management system safety.