Hitachi, Ltd. has announced the joint development of a resource sharing technology to flexibly share production facilities among enterprises with secure transfer of important information such as production quantity and machining process, with the Fraunhofer Institute for Manufacturing Engineering and Automation (Fraunhofer IPA) in Germany and the Institute for Computer Science and Control, Hungarian Academy of Sciences (MTA SZTAKI). This achievement was registered as a use case of the Japan-Germany IoT collaboration promoted by the Japanese Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI) and the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy (BMWi) to facilitate cooperation relating to IoT and Industrie 4.0.
With the increasing popularity of e-commerce in recent years, mass customization where customer needs change greatly over a short period of time has also advanced. As a result, there is a need in the manufacturing industry to address this diversification of customer needs and produce products in a timely manner.
Conventionally, it was common for each company to invest in their own production facilities in accordance with peak demands, but this approach carries with it the potential issues of declining capacity utilization rate and ROA. These issues are recognized as common to the Fourth Industrial Revolution which aims to enhance productivity and efficiency of production facilities by automation and connecting with the Internet, and solutions are being pursued worldwide.
Cooperation on use of IoT in manufacturing
At the Japan-Germany Summit Meeting in March 2015, the governments of Japan and Germany agreed to promote cooperation on the use of IoT in the manufacturing industry and Industrie 4.0. Based on this agreement, METI and BMWi announced a joint statement to cooperate in activities related to international standardization, industrial security, and technology research & development, etc. in April 2016.
Prior to this, Hitachi has been participating in the IEC(6) Market Strategy Board "Factory of the future" project from September 2014 and proposed a concept for a new production system "Crowd Manufacturing" based on the concept of a sharing economy.(8) "Crowd Manufacturing" supports both diversified customer needs and high utilization rate of production systems by enabling manufacturers to share production facilities on demand. This production system was proposed as a "Crowdsourcing Platform" in the IEC White Paper published in October 2015.
To verify the feasibility of "Crowd Manufacturing", Hitachi, Fraunhofer IPA, and MTA SZTAKI developed secure resource sharing technology among production systems and production facilities of multiple enterprises by encrypting important information such as production quantity and machining process.
Based on facilities usage contracts and production plans, the lender and borrower decide on important information to be encrypted, and the borrower encrypts the information. The encrypted information and other information necessary for production are transferred to the loaned production facilities, which temporarily connect to the production system, and are used for production.
When the loan period for the facility expires, the manufacturing information is voided. Using this technology, it is possible to utilize the production facilities of other enterprises as if they were owned while maintaining confidentiality of manufacturing information and thus securely share production facilities.
Further, a testbed manufacturing environment emulating a production line was built together with an IoT industrial controller with this technology.
Interconnectivity tests were carried out between the manufacturing execution system and production facilities in this testbed environment, with promising results, according to Hitachi.