A case study of intelligent manufacturing for key components of vehicles

Abstract

Currently, most research on intelligent manufacturing stays at the theoretical stage, which can enhance the understanding of smart factory concepts, but it is still difficult to establish a clear strategy for the industry. In this research, cyber-physical system (CPS) is applied to connect the manufacturing equipment of the production system, so as to develop the internet of things (IoT) object layer. Furthermore, a smart factory framework consisting of IoT object layer, CPS network layer, and CPS service layer is developed, connecting the smart shop-floor and the cloud service platform through the industrial network so as to implement the integration of physical manufacturing and virtual manufacturing. This framework is applied in the production of vehicle components, and the results show that the application of this framework in an actual automobile chassis smart factory can greatly improve production efficiency and energy efficiency, reduce enterprise costs, and shorten product development cycles, accelerating the process of enterprise transformation to informatization, digitalization, and intelligence. Since this framework for intelligent manufacturing has been verified under actual conditions, it can be taken as a reference for further development of the framework for intelligent manufacturing.