Dürr passes new mega paint shop to SAIC Volkswagen

April 15, 2021 10:29 am

Despite all the restrictions caused by the coronavirus pandemic, Dürr handed over one of the biggest paint shops in China to SAIC Volkswagen right on schedule.

The new plant in Anting is a factory of superlatives. The production capacity is twice that of a standard paint shop at 120 bodies per hour, and behind the intelligent production is software and artificial intelligence on a hitherto unknown scale. A smart painting line records around 3,500 digital data points for every individual body alone. On top of this, sensors supply many gigabytes of data in process values for temperature, pressure, and humidity, for one example.

Over the 18-month project duration, six international product development teams from Dürr worked with up to ten developers in each case on the new technologies. They coordinated closely with SVW in short sprints, as is customary in agile development. To ensure as smooth an IT installation as possible in China, all the software functions were first tested in the Dürr headquarters in Bietigheim-Bissingen in an environment that faithfully replicated the conditions in Anting.

For the first time, consumption data such as energy, water, or air usage can be evaluated historically over long periods. This lays the foundation for sustainable plant operation. A further innovation is the use of mobile apps provided by various DXQ products. For example, employees can manage and filter alarm functions directly at the plant’s point of origin using tablets if the line comes to a stop.

At SVW in Anting, the DXQ equipment maintenance software is being used for the first time for a complete paint shop, and as a mobile version. The software has interfaces to the plant equipment’s almost 130 controllers, and uses them to determine each piece of equipment’s need for maintenance based on up-to-date information like operating hours or counter readings. SVW can also incorporate plant components from other suppliers here.

Optimising the painting process with big data, several terabytes of digital data per year are collected, saved, and evaluated by the intelligent algorithms of the DXQ plant analytics application in the new paint shop. A broad base of data makes it possible to track the fault causes in a targeted way and define measures. In this way, the system can be permanently optimised. For the first time, process data from other suppliers’ components and systems are also evaluated at SVW in Anting using DXQ plant analytics, for example in Application Technology.