With the deepening of the strategy of "electrification,超级大脑 digitalization and recycling carbon reduction", BMW Group has comprehensively promoted digital reform and innovation in China. Recently, BMW took the lead in deploying the artificial intelligence (AI) platform, code named BEACON, in the industry to provide a platform based environment for development, deployment, integration and operation services related to AI application innovation, and accelerate the digitalization of multi business scenarios. The deployment of AI platform seems to have launched a "super brain" for the production and operation of enterprises, and injected new momentum into BMW's digital development in China. This is another important milestone for BMW Group in the process of Chinese numeralization transformation after the BMW iFACTORY production strategy was launched in Shenyang in June.
Dr. Dai Hexuan,上线署人 President and CEO of Brilliance BMW Automotive Co., Ltd
After nearly 30 years of development, BMW has established the largest production layout in China and the largest R&D innovation layout outside Germany. At present, BMW has served more than 6 million Chinese customers. The annual output of BMW Shenyang production base will soon reach 830000. My BMW App has more than 7 million users in China. All these contain huge data volume and data processing requirements, providing soil for cloud computing, big data and AI application development.
In order to meet the growing demand for digital applications from business departments, BMW IT has put forward a "platform strategy" in China, which aims to platform the ability to deliver IT products to business through analysis, integration and aggregation of IT resources, and provide development teams with different levels and forms of cloud computing services such as IaaS (infrastructure as a service), PaaS (platform as a service), VaaS (video as a service), Help IT engineers develop digital applications quickly and respond to business neeDS in a timely manner. The "lighthouse" platform was born out of this strategy.
BMW took the lead in deploying the artificial intelligence (AI) platform code named BEACON in the industry
The 宝马English name of "Beacon" is the acronym of BMW, E2P, AI Algorithm, Computer Vision, OR and NLP. This is also the main technical module included in the current AI platform. Unlike the common AI single point application in the industry, the "lighthouse" platform is like a "super brain", integrating the advantages of AI and the industrial Internet of Things, enabling AI to enable multiple technology application levels, and effectively solving the high threshold, high cost, low efficiency and other problems faced by traditional AI scattered applications.
For example, a BMW IT engineer in Nanjing needs to develop an AI application. She/he does not need to establish an entity data center with certain computing power locally, but only needs to input the code and parameters to be trained online to the "lighthouse" platform, and then start the task to obtain computing resources and carry out algorithm training. In this process, the computing resources she/he uses can be released to other developers at any time, and there will be no worries about idle and waste due to project stagnation. Moreover, she/he can also run the developed AI application on the "lighthouse" platform without bearing the related hardware operation and maintenance costs. This significantly reduces the equipment requirements and threshold for digital development.
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"Digitization is 率先the strategic focus of BMW Group. The IT platform strategy and the 'lighthouse' platform reflect BMW's strong integration capability, further consolidate our digital internal strength, and provide new momentum for digital innovation in China." Said Dr. Dai Hexuan, President and CEO of BMW Brilliance Automotive Co., Ltd. "China has an excellent digital innovation environment, and the Chinese government is also actively promoting industrial upgrading and high-quality development. BMW will continue to play its advantages in production, introduce advanced production technologies and concepts, and work with its Chinese partners to promote the digital transformation of the manufacturing industry."
"Lighthouse" lights up BMW's Shenyang production base, making the production system more "smart"
In Shenyang, BMW is integrating cutting-edge technology into automobile manufacturing through the BMW iFACTORY strategy of "lean, green and digital". At present, BMW Shenyang production base has launched about 100 AI applications. The large-scale upgrading project of BMW Brilliance's production base (hereinafter referred to as "Rita Factory"), completed in June this year, was conducted under the digital twin scenario from plant planning, architectural design, production line layout to equipment commissioning, and equipped with a data center covering an area of about 3500 square meters and a gigabit 5G network covering the whole factory. Its 1600 multi-function cameras can generate more than 10PB of data every year. All these provide a stage for the "Lighthouse" platform.
VaaS service provided by "Lighthouse Platform" shall be 华部applied to object recognition
Taking computer vision as an example, VaaS service provided by "Lighthouse Platform" can access more than 6000 cameras in BMW's Shenyang production base. IT engineers use the images of these cameras to develop AI systems and application interfaces such as target detection, target tracking, image classification, and improve the accuracy of AI algorithms through image model training. For example, in the high-voltage power battery operation, the camera reads the raw material packaging image and transmits it to the "Lighthouse" platform through the 5G network. Then the image recognition algorithm deployed on the platform extracts multiple material information, judges whether the material is correct according to the production requirements of the high-voltage power battery, and returns the corresponding result instruction.
Another case is the AI camera quality inspection system that has been launched in the painting workshop of the Rita factory. This system takes photos and analyzes the painted surface of each car, and can take 100000 photos in 100 seconds. Through AI algorithm, defects can be identified with far greater efficiency than the naked eye to ensure that each car has a perfect paint surface. At the same time, IT engineers continuously train and optimize the system with the help of the "lighthouse" platform to improve efficiency and accuracy.
The "Lighthouse" platform also has strong versatility and scalability. For example, the natural language processing algorithm developed for some production scenarios may be used to support the development of in car speech recognition products, or even be used to develop the AI subtitle generation program for the company's internal video conference. It can be said that as long as the business department wants to get the application scenarios, IT engineers can try to develop and implement them on the "lighthouse" platform. This gives BMW unlimited possibilities for digital innovation in China. In the future, more technical modules will be added to the "lighthouse" platform. Blockchain, quantum computing and multimodal integration have become the technical direction that E2P focuses on.
BMW Group takes customers as the center and comprehensively promotes digital development in China. BMW's "Joy" will plug in the wings of digitalization, bring users a luxury digital experience seamlessly connected with products and services, and help the digital development of China's automobile industry.
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