that have paved the way from Industry 4.0 to Industry 4.1 but also provides numerous practical industrial application cases in different manufacturing industries. It thus offers readers a comprehensive perspective of what they are and will be facing in the industry. I am sure this book is fundamental – a must‐have indeed – for researchers, engineers, and focused students in the fields of, among others, Intelligent Manufacturing and Industry 4.1.
Huey‐Jen Su
President, National Cheng Kung University (NCKU)
Industry 4.0 is a confluence of trends and technologies for the fourth industrial revolution. It has been “pushed” by the digital revolution over the past many decades and the recent Internet of Things (IoT); and “pulled” by demand from customers for high quality and customized products at reasonable prices and lead times. With (i) the ubiquitous connection and interaction of machines, things, and people; (ii) the integration of cyber and physical systems; and (iii) the emerging of disruptive technologies such as big data, machine learning, artificial intelligence, 3D printing and robotics, the ways we design and manufacture products and provide services are undergoing fundamental changes.
Although much R&D progress has been made, industries have been slow to develop effective holistic Industry 4.0 strategies. From a recent survey of 2000 C‐suite executives by Deloitte (https://www2.deloitte.com/content/dam/insights/us/articles/us32959‐industry‐4‐0/DI_Industry4.0.pdf), only 10% of the executives surveyed indicated they had long‐range strategies to leverage new technologies that reach across their organizations. This is not surprising since creating and implementing holistic Industry 4.0 strategies are complicated, and require deep understanding, sharp vision, inspirational leadership, and resolute persistence. Among those with comprehensive Industry 4.0 strategies, the results have been impressive: 73% of those with a strategy report success in protecting their businesses from disruption, versus 12% of those with more scattershot approaches; 61% of those with Industry 4.0 strategies report that they have developed innovative products and services, versus 12% of those lacking strategies; and 60% of those with Industry 4.0 strategies report that they have found growth opportunities for existing products and services, versus 8% of those lacking strategies. Those companies with strategies also are growing more financially, and making more progress investing in technologies that have a positive societal impact.
Consider specifically a key area of Industry 4.0, the quality of products and processes. It is well‐known that a host of methods and processes such as Statistical Process Control (SPC), Zero Defect Manufacturing (ZDM), Six Sigma Methodologies, Preventive Maintenance (PM), Continuous Improvement (Kaizen), Total Quality Management (TQM), etc., have been around for years and are contributing to the quality of products and processes. Integrating the digital revolution, the Internet of Things, big data, machine learning, and artificial intelligence to raise the quality of products and processes to a new level and with practical and scalable implementations, however, remains a major challenge for scholars, practitioners, and C‐suite executives alike.
This book “Industry 4.1 – Intelligent Manufacturing with Zero Defects” focuses on improving the quality of products and processes, and is the culmination of the brilliant but down‐to‐the‐earth efforts of the team led by Professor Fan‐Tien Cheng over the past many years. The efforts started with Virtual Metrology. In view of the incompatible paces of fast production and slow metrology, 100% inspection is impossible, and sample inspection has been the practice. With the advancements in sensing, metrology, analytics and Industry 4.0 technologies, the team innovatively integrated physical metrology with its cyber counterparts, Virtual Metrology (VM). The resulting Automatic Virtual Metrology (AVM) system presented in this book is capable of predicting the quality of a product based on machine parameters, sensor data in the production equipment, and off‐line sampling measurements. It also provides on‐line and real‐time total inspection of all work pieces to timely detect abnormalities during production. As a result, the sampling rate of real measurements can be cut down, the production costs can be reduced, and the goal of nearly zero defects of deliverables can be achieved.
Effective implementation of Automatic Virtual Metrology, however, is not easy, especially if we want it to be scalable to large factories and transferrable to other companies and other industries. Major infrastructure needs to be established efficiently and flexibly. Based on the team’s successful research, development, implementation, and redeployment at many factories and across multiple industries, this book methodically presents the essential infrastructure components. The content includes data collection and management and feature extraction; communication standards; computation infrastructure of cloud, edge, Internet of Things and big data; container‐related software development, deployment, and management technologies of Docker and Kubernetes; the overall architecture of the advanced manufacturing “Cloud of Things” framework, and the specific design and implementation of key components such as cyber‐physical agents, big data analytics application platform, the automated construction scheme for manufacturing services, and AVM and other servers.
Extending the ideas, methods, and infrastructure presented above, the book then focuses on Intelligent Predictive Maintenance (IPM). Predictive maintenance, sometimes known as “condition‐based maintenance,” is to monitor the performance and conditions of equipment during operations to predict when equipment performance is deteriorating and when equipment is going to fail, followed by scheduled or corrective maintenance. Intelligent Predictive Maintenance presented in this book detects the abnormality of key components of manufacturing tools based on advanced fault detection and classification techniques and predicts their Remaining Useful Lives (RUL) using time series prediction algorithms. Factory‐wide implementation is then discussed to improve tool availability and prevent unscheduled down of manufacturing tools.
Since modern manufacturing facilities are generally capital intensive, it is critical to have consistently high yields to justify the investment and to have a positive bottom line. Intelligent Yield Management (IYM) presented in this book is a closely related cousin of Intelligent Predictive Maintenance, with the purpose to effectively detect root causes that affect the yield. It consists of data collection and management; statistical, big data, and machine learning tools for defect and yield analysis; and timely resolution of issues discovered while maintaining the requisite quality and reliability standards. The kernel of the above is the “Key‐variable Search Algorithm” (KSA), which includes new root‐cause search methods for solving the high‐dimensional variable selection problem, and modules for checking the quality of input data and for evaluating the reliability of search results.
The current Industry 4.0‐related technologies emphasize productivity improvement but not on quality enhancement. They can have the faith of achieving nearly Zero‐Defect Manufacturing but without effective methods to achieve it. By developing and implementing the novel methods, technologies, and infrastructure presented above, zero defects of products can be effectively achieved. This is what is defined as Industry 4.1 in the book. The actual deployment cases in seven industries, including flat panel display, semiconductor, solar cell, automobile, aerospace, carbon fiber, and blow molding, are presented in the final Chapter 11. The ingenuity is outstanding, the effort is tremendous, and the impact is far‐reaching and long‐lasting.
Since many acronyms are used throughout the book, readers are advised to have Abbreviation Lists handy when reading the book. Beyond this point, I sincerely hope that you enjoy reading the book, and delightfully discover the wonderful world of Industry 4.1.
