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Fujitsu and INESA Group Collaborate on Smart Manufacturing Project for “Made in China 2025”

Lama — Wed, 12 Oct 2016 10:23:25 +0000

Fujitsu Limited,Fujitsu (China) Holdings Co., Ltd.,INESA (Group) Co., Ltd.

Tokyo and Shanghai,

Fujitsu Limited, Fujitsu (China) Holdings Co., Ltd. (collectively “Fujitsu”), and INESA (Group) Co., Ltd.⁽¹⁾, a large-scale, state-owned company in China that provides smart city solutions, today announced that they are collaborating on a Smart Manufacturing Project known as “Made in China 2025,”⁽²⁾ a strategic framework which aims to strengthen competitiveness in manufacturing.

In response to the rapid changes in corporate business models and the market environment, the government of China has set forth “Made in China 2025”, which aims to combine cutting-edge ICT with manufacturing, shifting China from a manufacturing giant that mass-produces products to a manufacturing powerhouse that focuses on production quality. In the midst of this effort, using their abundant experience in the ICT and manufacturing fields, Fujitsu and INESA Group are jointly promoting their Smart Manufacturing Project, contributing to realizing the “Made in China 2025” plan.

As a member of a group of large-scale, state-run companies under the jurisdiction of the State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission of Shanghai Municipal Government, INESA Group has a history in the electronics manufacturing industry of more than fifty years. In order to adapt to the innovations of recent years, INESA Group, while manufacturing, is driving the development of the information industry, and has established the strategic goal of contributing to the building of smart cities as its business model, working to create a new industry that fuses ICT and manufacturing.

At a color-filter manufacturing plant of INESA Display Materials Co., Ltd., an INESA Group company, Fujitsu established a plan to turn the plant into a smart factory suited to current operations, by studying current processes and issues. Based on information from existing automated production lines and manufacturing management systems, Fujitsu is connecting the entire manufacturing process, including product manufacturing processes and production line placement, with technologies, such as big data and IoT. This is to achieve digital transformation, building a system that visualizes the efficiency of the factory with the use of tools such as Fujitsu’s sensors, network technologies, a dashboard solution, and a big data analysis platform, to advance INESA Group’s move toward smart manufacturing.

The three companies began this project in January of 2016, and aim to complete it in 2018. In the first stage of this project, Fujitsu organized and improved INESA Group’s existing information systems, advanced the deployment of IoT in the factory, and built a big data analysis platform. As a result, it has become possible to share data within the factory and visualize operations in real time. The constructed platform will support higher levels of factory intelligence in the future.

The specific initiatives implemented under the current project are as follows:

Building IoT platforms that utilize data in the factoryUsing Fujitsu’s unique intelligent network communications technologies, the companies have improved the slow and unstable communication in the existing large-scale network, building a low-cost system to automatically collect energy consumption data, including for electricity, water and gas. In addition, by collecting and managing data through the IoT platform, energy consumption has been reduced, supporting the realization of a green factory.
Building a big data analysis platformThis system aggregates and centralizes the manufacturing progress data collected through the IoT platform, such as from sensors. This aggregated big data is processed and analyzed in real time under advanced security, enabling the detection of warning signs of problems in manufacturing equipment.
Building a system for visualizing efficiencies throughout the factoryUsing FUJITSU Enterprise Application Intelligent Dashboard, Fujitsu Limited’s solution that supports the overall optimization of factories, with the big data analysis platform, this system displays important key performance indicators, such as manufacturing, energy consumption, quality, facilities status, and expenses, in an integrated fashion. At the same time, it monitors the status of the production lines in real time, visualizing the efficiency of the factory as a whole.
Establishing standards for evaluating the degree of maturity of the smart factoryFujitsu assisted in formulating standards and an evaluation model for the degree of maturity of INESA Group’s smart factory using the three criteria of technology, implementation, and integration, based on INESA Group’s definitions and goals for smart manufacturing. In addition, during this smart manufacturing model factory project with INESA Group, the companies are carrying out studies and evaluations, extracting content and technology common across the industry and standardizing it, aiming to popularize a shared INESA Group standard within the industry.

Using the Fujitsu Limited Intelligent Dashboard to visualize efficiency for the factory as a whole, managers can control the operational status of the manufacturing lines across the entire factory from the factory’s central monitoring room. The project’s first stage of development has now gone online, and is already producing results in actual production management. For example, a great deal of time used to be spent on such tasks as collecting production status and statistical data, but with Fujitsu’s Intelligent Dashboard, it has become possible to intuitively grasp the situation. This can be expected to play a significant role in improvements in productivity and management going forward.

Owing to its cutting-edge technologies and as a model initiative for the industry, this project was chosen as a Smart Factory Model Project for 2016 in an evaluation by the Chinese Ministry of Industry and Information Technology. Fujitsu and INESA Group will continue to contribute to the digital transformation in China’s manufacturing industry going forward.

In addition, the three companies, as strategic partners, will spread this successful model to more manufacturing companies in China, working together to achieve the goals of “Made in China 2025.”

Comment from Cai Xiaoqing, President of INESA Group

INESA Group is focusing its efforts on creating smart factories, positioning this business as a core infrastructure business supporting INESA Group’s smart cities, while also advancing initiatives in our factories.

Through this project, by working with Fujitsu, I believe we will meet the business transformation needs of our many customers in the manufacturing industry, and contribute to transforming the manufacturing industry of China.

[1] INESA (Group) Co., Ltd.

Official Website: http://www.inesa.com/index.html

[2] Made in China 2025

On May 8, 2015, China’s State Council unveiled its first 10-year national plan for transforming China’s manufacturing, entitled “Made in China 2025.” The plan is designed to put China on a new path to industrialization, with greater emphasis on innovation, expanded use of new-generation information technology, intelligent manufacturing, consolidation of the industrial base, integration of industrial processes and systems, and a robust multilayer talent development structure. Measures taken in this respect will facilitate China’s transformation from a manufacturing giant with a focus on quantity to one with a qualitative edge.

Source by http://www.fujitsu.com

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Fujitsu Develops Technology to Automatically Extract Business Specifications in Programs

Lama — Wed, 12 Oct 2016 08:24:55 +0000

First-in-industry tech supports digital transformations, such as the migration of existing large-scale systems to the cloud, by more efficiently grasping business specifications

Fujitsu Laboratories Ltd.

Kawasaki, Japan

Fujitsu Laboratories Ltd. today announced the development of technology to analyze the programs of business systems, and automatically extract implemented business logic-based practices, calculation methods and other easy-to-understand tables.

When migrating or rebuilding business systems, an essential first step before beginning design and development work is to understand the currently implemented system specifications, but in many cases where a business system has continually grown in scale and complexity through years of development, specification documents have not been updated, and a great deal of time is required for preparation. With technology that divides large-scale programs and extracts the business specifications in table form, and technology that rebuilds a table for the whole program from the separated tables, it is now possible to automatically extract business specifications implemented in large-scale programs as an easy-to-understand tables of conditions, increasing the efficiency of grasping the current specifications coded in the program.

In a test case that applied this technology to programs within Fujitsu, the time required to update the specification documents was reduced by one third, enabling increased efficiency in migrating to systems, such as cloud, that can flexibly respond to business changes, while also following the business specifications of existing business systems. With this technology, Fujitsu will support the digital transformation of their customers’ business systems.

Development Background

Currently, as ICT environments such as the cloud and mobile are developing, many companies are working to migrate or rebuild existing business systems in the cloud, or add new functionality such as mobile support. There is a need for systems to rapidly respond to changes post-migration, while at the same time there is a demand for them to follow current business specifications. Actual business systems, however, have in many cases become black boxes. This is because they have undergone long periods of improvement and maintenance, becoming more complicated programs, while specification documents have become outdated and those workers who had developed the system are no longer involved. As such, a great deal of time is required to understand the business specifications of current operations.

Issues

In order to migrate business systems to systems with more flexibility with regard to change, Fujitsu Laboratories aims to manage business specifications with tables of conditions, as in business rule management systems (BRMS)⁽¹⁾, which can automatically execute business rules without creating programs. In order to accomplish this, it is first necessary to dig up business specifications from complicated existing programs, bring specification documents up to date, and rework the specifications into tables of conditions (Figure 1).

As for technologies for extracting tables of conditions, there is the method of using symbolic execution⁽²⁾ technology to extract the program’s execution path and organize it as a table (Figure 2). This method, however, was difficult to use with large-scale business systems, because the number of execution paths becomes massive as the program becomes larger and more complicated, creating an issue of practicality.

About the Newly Developed Technology

Now, Fujitsu Laboratories has developed the industry’s first technology to analyze large-scale programs in business systems, and then extract implemented business logic-based practices and calculation methods specifications in easy-to-understand tables of conditions.

This newly developed technology first breaks large-scale programs into processing blocks, focusing on the program’s structure and the complexity of the business logic, and extracts tables of conditions from each part using a unique symbolic execution technology. Next, it analyzes the program’s flow, such as subroutine calls, and program-internal variable references and updates, and combines the separately created tables of conditions to rebuild tables of conditions for the original processing target (Figure 3). For example, if the program were divided in the vicinity of a subroutine call, three tables of conditions, for the call origin, call time, and call object, will be extracted and combined.

This means that, while it was previously necessary to analyze the number of execution paths equivalent to the product of the number of call origins times the number of call objects, now, processing can be reduced to the sum of the number of paths. The effect of this reduction becomes greater the more nesting subroutine calls a program has. For example, when a program has three nesting subroutine calls, while it would previously have been necessary to analyze 3,060 execution paths, this can be reduced to 41. Also, by excluding from the analysis portions that do not relate directly to data processing for the task, such as input value checks and database processing, it is possible to extract tables of conditions for only the targeted task processes, eliminating unneeded paths.

The tables of conditions automatically extracted from programs with this newly developed technology can be used in the following ways (Figure 2, right):

Improving the efficiency of updating specification documents (re-documentation)Extracted tables of conditions accurately, completely, and simply show the results of running the programs, so this can reduce the time required for engineers to follow and understand the data being processed as the program runs. Documentation brought up to date using these tables of conditions can be used as references when designing the next system.
Making them into BRMS rulesBy processing the tables of conditions and turning them into BRMS rules, the efficiency of rule creation when migrating to BRMS will be increased, even in portions of business systems which have been greatly changed.

Results

With this newly developed technology, it has become possible to extract business specifications from complex, large-scale programs, which previously were not amenable to analysis. In an internal application of this technology to a large-scale COBOL program, it was demonstrated to increase the efficiency of creating business specifications, with the time required to redevelop specifications reduced by one-third. In addition, it was confirmed that tables of conditions extracted from large-scale programs of actual systems could be processed into BRMS rules.

Future Plans

In its approach to system migrations, Fujitsu Laboratories will, in combination with existing technology for identifying the feature components of software program assets⁽³⁾ and technology to visualize the degree of complexity in business logic⁽⁴⁾, work on testing and overcoming problems in this newly developed technology with the aim of bringing it into practical application in fiscal 2017.

[1] BRMS

Business Rule Management System. A system that, without the need to create a program, can execute business rules that have been formulated in a way that is easy for business managers to understand.

[2] Symbolic execution

Technology that exhaustively extracts processing paths that can be executed by programs as one way of analyzing programs.

[3] Technology for identifying the feature components of software program assets

“Fujitsu Develops World’s First Software Map Generating Technology to Leverage Application Portfolios,” (press release dated February 29, 2012): http://www.fujitsu.com/global/about/resources/news/press-releases/2012/0229-01.html

[4] Technology to visualize the degree of complexity in business logic

“Fujitsu Develops World’s First Technology that Visualizes Complexity of Business Logic in a Program’s Code,” (press release dated May 1, 2015): http://www.fujitsu.com/global/about/resources/news/press-releases/2015/0501-01.html

Source by http://www.fujitsu.com

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