PARTNER CONTENT: The 5G Positioning Industry Forum, hosted by the 5G Applications Industry Array, took place during this year’s PT Expo China, which was held in Beijing. During the forum, Wang Jun, the chief architect of Midea’s industrial Internet, discussed Midea’s innovative approach to 5G positioning in smart warehousing, as well as future plans for applying the industrial Internet.

As macro logistics and small-scale production, as well as factory logistics centralization, continue to trend in the manufacturing space, logistics has become the core of smart factories seeking value chain operations. This shift emphasizes the need to locate people, machines, and materials in almost all processes of factory logistics. However, such requirements are yet to be sufficiently addressed owing to the lack of efficient real-time logistics tracking capabilities. “5G offers a new direction to address this long-standing challenge as it can meet our requirements both for positioning and connectivity,” Wang Jun remarked at the forum.

5G Positioning Drives Down Logistics and Warehousing Costs

In the fiercely competitive home appliance industry, logistics make up 35% of the total sales costs. At the same time, home appliance vendors in China’s first-tier cities are dealing with a 13% hike in warehousing expense in August, 2021. This reflects the importance of efficient and cost-effective warehousing and logistics in improving core competitiveness.

In Midea’s factory logistics systems, a variety of processes are supported by different networks from workshop to workshop, leading to weak digitalization as well as inefficient information flow and production operations. To overcome these issues, Media initiated digital transformation of its entire logistics processes based on cutting-edge positioning solutions. Realizing the potential of 5G technology in indoor positioning, Midea worked with China Unicom’s Guangdong branch to deploy Huawei’s 5G network solutions in its smart end-to-end logistics system. Based on the 5G network, both coarse and precise positioning are supported in its logistics and warehousing processes with a reliability of above 99.99%. The network provides a concurrent throughput greater than 600 Mbps, enabling a single access point to accommodate more than 30 collection points, which is essential for Midea to ensure both efficiency and consistency between materials and inventory accounts while reducing dependence on manual labor and facilitating paperless operations.

The 5G network uses 16 macro base stations and 253 indoor small cells to provide services for both indoor and outdoor areas across the factory. The user plane function (UPF) part is locally deployed to ensure that data is processed within the factory, while the mobile edge computing (MEC) part works in active and standby mode between the headquarters and kitchen appliances division to guarantee reliability. A high-uplink channel of 1.2 Gbps is available as well in indoor areas. On top of unified 5G network and MEC cloud, 5G private network self-service, slicing management, and AI analysis platforms are overlaid to support various applications. 25 applications have been planned in 2021 for over 600 sites, 16 of which have already been implemented across 327 sites.
According to Wang Jun, 5G has enabled greater streamlining of Midea’s production systems. For example, Midea has concluded a pilot program relating to clamp truck positioning and dispatching based on 5G positioning in its smart logistics systems. With smart warehousing empowered by 5G positioning, the average time required to locate parts and goods is shortened by 80%, warehousing labor costs are reduced by 21%, and loading efficiency increases by 55%. As 5G positioning continues to improve, more applications will become supported, including distribution tractors, logistics trucks, warehouse clamp trucks, and staff-job tracking. In this regard, distribution tractor applications have already been verified, showing that the indoor positioning accuracy can reach 1–3 m. Wang Jun said that Midea plans to put more than 300 logistics devices on its production line within one year, including clamp trucks, distribution tractors, and revolving carts.

The Blueprint for 5G Fully-Connected Factories Is Becoming a Reality
Midea initiated 5G industrial Internet across several divisions in 2019, and its program for fully-connected factories based on 5G was inaugurated in 2021. According to its group plans, 2021 marks the third phase of 5G application development, in which 5G smart manufacturing solutions will be deployed on top of both AI and cloud platforms across all divisions. As such, 5G will play a leading role in building fully-connected factories.

In addition to 5G smart logistics applications, Midea is expanding other applications based on 5G in its manufacturing campuses, including AR remote assistance, fault prediction for coating devices and KUKA robot connections, quality inspection for screw installation and plates, AI operation monitoring, equipment data collection, and cloud supervision — all of which result in significant efficiency improvement and reduced labor costs.

Wang Jun mentioned the benefits of Midea’s fully-connected factories. “The annual overall costs are reduced by CNY30 million and warehousing operations are becoming more paperless and less dependent on manual operations, helping us improve efficiency as we continue to digitally transform with 5G and intelligent solutions.”

In its bid to further expand the applications of the industrial Internet, Midea increasingly needs positioning and connectivity capabilities to build new workshops, modernize existing ones, and collaborate with industry partners. This has pushed the company to pilot smart factories in 2020, promote the pilot program in 2021, and trial 5G fully-connected factories at several campuses across China in 2022. Midea is also building its own industrial IoT system in collaboration with more than 20 partners. Known as M.IoT, this system incorporates 5G terminals, industrial devices, application integration, and AI algorithms, to develop 5G hardware and applications. To date, M.IoT has been adopted by more than 300 customers from over 40 sectors. 5G has played a key role in enabling these solutions and will continue to enable more partners to pursue digitalization.

“5G fully-connected factories will enable Midea to fully connect people, machines, materials, and processes across all production lines, streamlining operations across the entire value chain and using AI to automatically analyze and process data for closed-loop optimization,” concluded Wang Jun. “This will ultimately enable us to explore data-driven operations and management, and achieve high-quality, cost-effective, and flexible green manufacturing.