The Haier Hefei Refrigerator Interconnected Factory is the world’s largest single-unit manufacturing base in the refrigerator industry, producing with six major brands on five continents. As an industry pioneer, the factory integrates Industry 4.0 technologies to meet personalized user demands and improve production efficiency. Powered by AI, it successfully transitioned from traditional to intelligent manufacturing.
Facing the challenges of increasing demand for personalization, rising production complexity, and equipment maintenance, the Haier Hefei Refrigerator Interconnected Factory implemented a comprehensive Industry 4.0 transformation plan. Through the deployment of digital twin technology, an AI predictive maintenance platform, and a flexible production system, the factory achieved full digitalization and intelligence from production to R&D. The Industry 4.0 solution include:
To address the complexity of assembling non-standard components, an adaptive robot programming system was developed. Combining multimodal large models and six-dimensional force feedback technology, the system reduced program debugging time by 83% and improved assembly accuracy by 10%.
A refrigerator health prediction model was established using data from 6.7 million smart refrigerators. It enables automatic diagnosis and optimization of abnormal parameters, reducing customer complaints by 33%, cutting warranty costs by 38%, and shortening R&D cycles by 11%.
The factory completes over 200 new injection mold changeovers annually, a process that traditionally suffered from inefficiency and quality fluctuations. By employing injection parameter optimization models and particle swarm algorithms, the system quickly identifies optimal process parameter combinations. This reduced changeover time by 38%, improved injection molding OEE by 25%, and increased first-pass yield by 20%.
To address complex equipment types and high failure rates, the factory developed an intelligent diagnostic platform based on large language models and knowledge graphs. Utilizing over 100,000 maintenance records, the system enabled precise and rapid diagnosis, reducing mean time to repair (MTTR) by 28% and decreasing the number of maintenance engineers required by 20%.
