During the Spring Festival, a traditional festival carrying deep emotions of hundreds of millions of Chinese people, many manufacturing enterprises have to face the difficulty of labor shortage. Especially in advanced manufacturing, the operation of the factory cannot be stopped due to the Spring Festival, and the challenge of this long holiday is particularly severe. Beijing BOE Display Technology Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as: BOE) has successfully solved this problem with an innovative intelligent solution - LOFA.
Inside the BOE Beijing B4 factory, the usually busy production line was relatively quiet during the Spring Festival. Employees returned home in batches for the festival. In previous years, the employees who stayed on duty had to share the work of their colleagues who returned home. This year, Shanghai Glorysoft Software Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as: Glorysoft) LOFA took over and continued to accurately and efficiently execute repair on the production line instead of the returning employees, effectively ensuring the smooth operation of the production process.
The BOE B4 factory has the first 8.5 - generation TFT - LCD (Thin Film Transistor Liquid Crystal Display Device) production line in mainland China, mainly used for 26 - 55 - inch TFT - LCD displays, modules, and related products for monitors and liquid crystal televisions. Currently, the production line has a total floor area of about 370,000 square meters and a designed capacity of 90,000 glass substrates per month, including four parts of production processes: array, color film, cell, and module (Array, CF, Cell, Module). BOE is a leading enterprise in the display field in China that first completely mastered the core technology of TFT - LCD. It also takes the lead in intelligent manufacturing and digitization in advanced manufacturing. As early as 2014, Glorysoft launched the first PCC (Process Control Center System) in the national panel display industry on B4, realizing real - time monitoring and remote control of the production process in terms of equipment management, process optimization, and fault diagnosis.
In the production process of the panel industry, quality inspection and defect repair are important links to ensure the quality of LCD products. The traditional manual defect inspection and repair methods have high subjectivity, high misdetection and omission rates, low repair efficiency, and it is difficult to ensure the repair success rate, which seriously affects the yield. There is an urgent need for an intelligent automatic defect detection and repair solution to save human efficiency and improve quality and reduce material waste to maximize the benefits.
LOFA, whose full name is Light Off Factory Assistant Black Light Factory Assistant, is an intelligent control digital platform product of Glorysoft for advanced manufacturing in Industry 4.0. Industry 4.0, also known as the fourth industrial revolution, has a black light factory (also called a smart factory or an unmanned factory) as its ultimate form. The main characteristics of Industry 4.0 are that all processing, transportation, and detection processes are completed in an empty "black light factory" without human operation, handing the factory over to machines. Based on the three modernizations of the factory (automation, digitization, and intelligence), a factory using advanced digital information technology, intelligent robots, and automation equipment and systems allows equipment to complete tasks according to system instructions through digitization and intelligence, making the production, storage, transportation, and detection processes more flexible and intelligent.
LOFA combines remote centralized control, artificial intelligence, industrial vision, and other technologies and the experience accumulated by Glorysoft in the semiconductor and panel industries. It can automatically adjust the lens magnification and locate the defective position, and the RCM end remotely controls the automatic repair of products. The solution implemented by LOFA deeply uses artificial intelligence technologies such as text recognition, target detection, image classification, and template matching to perform core tasks such as automatic defect classification, defect location detection, and interface character recognition. Through the intelligent RPA technology, a high - precision, unmanned real - time automatic operation process for defect detection and repair is realized.
The production mode of the black light factory changes the personnel from the site to the "lighthouse control center", and the factory production is managed through the automation of equipment and production management system processes. The personnel in the control center monitor the factory production status and handle abnormal situations. Through the AI intelligent assistant, the difficulties of existing central control personnel are solved, making the factory more intelligent. LOFA uses different component methods to quickly implement different businesses, such as monitoring center large screens, operation on behalf of others, image detection, big data analysis, and intelligent reverse control.
The panel industry has a large number of products and models, with numerous and detailed defect classifications, which pose a certain challenge to algorithms. As a global leading enterprise in the industry, BOE requires that key indicators such as production accuracy and operation rate on behalf of others reach the advanced level in the industry. The entire technical solution of LOFA in BOE B4, including system processes, software development, and algorithm design, is an innovative R & D process from 0 to 1, which is a new practice of the production mode of an unmanned factory in the panel industry. As the world's largest display screen producer, BOE supplies more than a quarter of the world's display screens.
This mode not only reduces personnel input and improves the human - efficiency ratio but also takes a substantial step towards the black light factory management mode in terms of the operation mode.
Black Light Factory Assistant LOFA can be applied to production processes such as Array, CF, Cell in the production line, Repair stations, and AOI, macroscopic, and lighting production scenarios. In the future, Glorysoft will continue to expand and enrich applicable scenarios, realizing the automation of the underlying machine production process and human - efficiency improvement through AI learning, artificial intelligence, and big data analysis, and combining with SOP and KM. Finally, using the network as a bond to connect the equipment to the industrial network platform, using it to establish digital models of products, processes, equipment, and production lines, providing new applications such as production process and flow optimization and equipment predictive maintenance.
1.Saving
The data of machine tools is centrally managed to improve management efficiency, enabling unmanned full - inspection, reducing labor costs, optimizing the human - machine ratio, and increasing labor productivity. With the equipment automation online, LOFA cooperates with control, detection, and repair automation equipment to fully realize automated production, greatly reducing the number of on - site personnel and saving 60% - 80% of labor.
2.Accuracy
Replacing the original manual grading, position confirmation, and repair work, reducing misdetection and omission rates, greatly reducing the intensity of manual work, and avoiding the risk of manual misoperation. The misdetection and omission ratio is reduced to less than 1%, and the repair accuracy rate is increased to over 98%. Machine learning improves the accuracy rate of ADC automatic image judgment to over 99% (the accuracy rate of manual recognition is usually about 80%).
3.Stability
The hardware is connected to the machine tools, collecting the pictures and control information of the machine tools in a non - destructive way, not interfering with the work flow of the machine tools, and having no risk of data leakage.
The LOFA platform operates continuously, stably, and efficiently for 7 * 24 hours, including a complete alarm mechanism.
The successful launch of the BOE intelligent control digital platform LOFA not only effectively alleviates the labor shortage problem during the Spring Festival but also saves a large amount of labor costs for the factory, significantly improves the production yield, brings considerable economic benefits, and further promotes the construction of a digital factory. This model of a leading enterprise will promote the process of Industry 4.0 in more advanced manufacturing in the industry. Glorysoft and BOE have jointly explored intelligent production for more than ten years and will always be consistent, using advanced self - developed innovative technologies to contribute to BOE's leading the global display technology.
