DSIC’s First Firm Step for IM-Digital Workshop Passed National Acceptance Check

DSIC on May 18 passed the national acceptance check for the pilot demonstration project of ship block fabrication digital workshop, which marks DSIC has stepped out the first firm step towards intelligent manufacturing (IM). As the first shipbuilding enterprise with digital workshop, DSIC shall play a demonstrating and guiding role for the whole shipbuilding industry to enter IM inevitably.

Automation and informationization is key feature of this digital workshop, where many types of intelligent robots are equipped, such as writing robot, sub-assembly welding robot, smart edge-milling and sorting robot, grinding robot, watertight plate-repair robot and T-type profile joint robot, together with various types of digital automatic welding equipment. The project shall, aimed at setting up a pilot demonstration of IM digital workshop for ship intermediate products, employing information technology of Internet of Things and Cloud Computing, under the service pattern of big data, through organic combination and mutual interpenetration of design, production and management, based on digital design, and applying the grouping technique, conduct the management and control on manufacturing resources, plans and procedures in the digital workshop for ship block fabrication.

With this project into implementation, DSIC shall approach the level of advanced shipbuilding enterprises in Japan and Korea in many manufacturing links, which will increase its productivity greatly. In many indicators, many typical ship production units, and applications of digital upgrade and flexible transformation for the production and processing lines, DSIC shall play a role in pilot demonstration for the domestic shipbuilding enterprises, with a good value of popularization and application. Pass rate of block precision is ≥98%, block fabricating efficiency increases 30%, and energy consumption in the production process decreases 5.5% while equipment availability increases 30%, which enables the manufacturing process to be more transparent, and various types of abnormities in the manufacturing process to respond agilely so as to ensure the production in order. Meanwhile, the arrangement of production plans is more reasonable to cut down the bottleneck problems and improve the entire productivity; decrease logistical bottleneck and improve logistical distribution precision to reduce work being held up for lack of material; forecast quality trend more accurately and control quality defects more effectively; make decision basis more detailed and decision process more intuitive and decision result more rational; work out asymmetric information problems; reduce communication cost and prop up collaborative manufacturing.

Ship block manufacturing link is a key one to restrict shipyards in China to achieve improving capacity, reduce cost and increase benefit, and develop IM. Therefore, it is a key issue under desideration for smart shipyards to set up a ship block fabrication digital workshop. This project is one of the most important measures for DSIC to enhance deep blending of informationization and industrialization and push integrated innovation of new-generation information technology and manufacturing technology during ship construction, which has played a crucial part for DSIC in improving the resource configuration optimization and promoting the equipment intelligent upgrade, technological flow reformation and basic data sharing.