Today, the conductor of the 3175 train from Leipzig to Dresden received a task to introduce the DBME standard double-decker coach car to a guest from Canada.

After receiving this task, the conductor was stunned for a moment, and then became excited. It has always been the socialist countries that imported technology from the capitalist countries, and today things are reversed, and the capitalist countries want to introduce the latest locomotive manufacturing technology to the socialist countries, which means that the DMME double-decker buses designed by East Germany have been recognized by the capitalist countries, and the DMME buses are the best trains in the world.

Leipzig Central Station was built in 1899, fortunately spared the Soviet artillery fire and Allied bombing in World War II.

Foster sat on a fluffy sofa admiring the baroque décor of the room, while Navalry, with the help of the translator Linus, was talking about official articles with the accompanying officials of the East German Ministry of Foreign Trade.

The group walked up to the platform in advance and waited for the train to enter the station, and a few minutes later, the red-and-white Type 242 electric locomotive pulled the light blue body of DBME-B in the distance. The official of the GDR Ministry of Foreign Trade who accompanied him pointed to the train in the distance and said: "DBME double-decker buses have been operating in more than 40 formations in our country, and there have been no failures since they were launched in 73. ”

After the train has stopped. The sliding folding doors are quietly opened, and the East German station adopts the high platform commonly used in the West, and the platform is level with the train floor, so that passengers can easily move between the train and the platform.

Foster and the others boarded the DBME double-decker coach for the first time, and the side walls of the car were in a creamy white hue, with a dark red carpet on the brown-yellow floor and a row of cream-white rectangular lights inlaid in the center of the top of the car. The light gray individual seats are arranged in a 2+2 way of civil aviation. After ascending to the second floor of the carriage, the view suddenly opens up, and the large aluminum alloy windows look pleasing to the eye. There were not many people in the carriage. Only a third of the seats were full, and the seats were very well wrapped, and to Foster's surprise, there was a small board table on the backrest of the front seats.

Soon after the waitress of the train brought coffee to everyone, the train started slowly.

According to the predetermined arrangement, Foster revealed the plan discussed with Ling Shizhe last night to the officials of the Ministry of Foreign Trade in East Germany little by little. And Navalli and Andy. The two Groves began to inspect the entire train.

Twenty minutes later, there was a rough evaluation of the DBME underneath, and the bus decoration is very in line with the current popular bus decoration in Europe, but it is inferior in details.

The degree of automation is no worse than that of Western European countries, and the East German carriages in the 70s are the same as those in France and Germany in Western Europe, and they all use decentralized power supply. Each car comes with its own diesel engine, generator, air conditioner, before the birth of a new generation of microcomputer automation management system, the maintenance of the train is much more troublesome than the later centralized power supply of the bottom of the car.

Andy. Accompanied by the crew, Grove also visited the power distribution room in the carriage, and sure enough, as he had guessed, there were electrical cabinets full of instruments in front of him, and it was clear that the GDR had not yet found a suitable bus to integrate all the systems of the train.

This makes Andy. Grove breathed a sigh of relief, thinking that East Germany's automation technology had surpassed Ambrera, but what he saw today, he could explain to his boss Ling Shizhe.

The automatic control system of the DBME carriage in East Germany is very advanced in design, the same as the train management concept designed by Ambrera, and the company is currently developing a PLC train monitoring system, which can be seamlessly grafted with this train, which will greatly reduce the transformation work of the train.

Seeing that there was nothing left to see, the two returned to their seats and met the gaze handed by Foster. Grove nodded solemnly.

His actions did not avoid the East German diplomats, and to be honest, this was the first time that East Germany exported advanced locomotive technology to a capitalist country. Grove nodded and the East German personnel were happy, and actively told Foster about the advantages of the DBME series of buses.

The Unified Locomotive Consortium is the largest railway equipment manufacturer in the GDR, with enterprises throughout the GDR, and is the largest supplier of high-end passenger cars to the socialist Zhengying, while the DMME series of passenger cars is one of the largest intercity rail passenger cars exported in East Germany. Due to the highest level of automation in the 70s, the Unified Locomotive Consortium put the double-decker coaches in Dresden, the development center of industrial automation technology in East Germany.

The enterprise factories of the unified locomotive are all Soviet-style cement factories, which makes Foster and Navali and others look at it with amazement.

The workshop for the production of DBME double-decker buses has a very high level of automation, and the East German translator who accompanied him pointed to the automated production line composed of several large welding machines and said proudly: "Only three people are needed to operate this welding line to complete the main welding work of the car body." ”

Foster and his entourage saw that the eggs hurt very much, and they looked at the automatic production line composed of cutting, forging, welding and other equipment in front of them. I have to admit that East Germany is worthy of being the tenth industrial country in the world, and it has almost achieved the ultimate in "hard" industrial automation, but this kind of automated production line has a fatal weakness, that is, it is only suitable for mass production, but it is used for small batches, multi-series, multi-variety production mode, this production line should obviously be eliminated.

In the case of double-decker carriages, if the position of the doors is changed by 50 centimeters, the production line will have to be scrapped and rebuilt. It is precisely because of this that the things produced in socialist countries are rated as unchanged styles for decades, and product defects have not changed for decades. Now the West is actively developing flexible production lines is the future development direction.

Dresden is less than 200 kilometers from Leipzig, and the six of them returned to Leipzig the same day after visiting the Unified Locomotive Complex.

Lying on the bed in the Leipzig Hotel, Navalli watched as Foster looked intently through the documents he had brought back from the Unified Locomotive Factory. He said: "President Foster, I don't think you need to look at that thing, I don't recommend introducing their production line as it is." ”

Andy. Grove agreed with Navali's proposal, saying, "It's outdated, it just looks advanced." ”

"Is that what everyone thinks?" Foster asked.

John. Martin and Linus nodded.

Looking at Christopher, who was silent, Foster asked, "Christopher, you are an expert in mechanics, and I would like to hear your opinion." ”

Christopher thought for five minutes before he spoke: "My opinion is that an East German production line should be introduced as it is. ”

"What? Christopher, are you crazy, that automated production is outdated, why do you still want to introduce it? Navali said in surprise, he never thought Christopher would agree, and let him get up from the bed.

Everyone in the room also agreed with Navalli's proposal, believing that the introduction of this line was unnecessary, including Foster, but as the leader of the group, he had to listen carefully to the opinions of every subordinate and not be arbitrary, so he said, "Tell everyone your opinion." ”

So everyone looked at Christopher to see what he said differently.

Christopher didn't answer immediately, but first made everyone a cup of coffee, and when he picked up the coffee and took a sip, Christopher spoke: "Everyone knows, I am the president of Ambrera Seiko Equipment Co., Ltd., and I have been dealing with machinery and equipment all my life, especially automation equipment. Everyone knows the purpose of the boss sending me here, to get advanced automation technology, but by what means. At this, Christopher's tone increased slightly.

"Although the bus automation production line in East Germany is a backward "hard" automation production line, many of its designs still give me a lot of inspiration, therefore, as an automated mechanical engineer, my opinion is to introduce it, but we do not use it for production, but as a research platform, which is conducive to our absorption of East Germany's advanced automation design concepts.

And the real use of production is equipment, my suggestion is to use our own research and development of flexible intelligent production lines. ”

Andy. Foster covered his head and said, "Oh, Christopher, our own flexible and intelligent automatic production line is not yet mature. ”

"We can build a slightly smaller experimental factory first, anyway, after the introduction of the train, it is not possible to produce it on a large scale in a while and a half, we have to ask customers all over the world to talk to each other, a small experimental intelligent factory is enough." When the technology is mature, it will be promoted on a large scale throughout the company, and the world's first intelligent manufacturing plant will start with DBME buses! Christopher said sonorously.

Intelligent factory is the use of a variety of modern technology to realize the automation of factory office, management and production, to strengthen and standardize enterprise management, reduce work errors, plug various loopholes, improve work efficiency, safe production, provide decision-making reference, strengthen external contacts, and expand the international market.

The concept of intelligent factory is an upgraded version of the unmanned manufacturing factory, which is based on the Internet in later generations, because in this era, the Internet does not even have a concept, so Ling Shizhe thought of a compromise solution, based on the LAN intelligent factory program.

It is to use a fiber to connect the central large database room, monitoring room and various systems produced by the factory, so as to realize the building automation system, production process monitoring system, industrial television monitoring and security television monitoring system, anti-theft alarm system, parking lot management system, card intelligent management system, public broadcasting system, integrated wiring system, computer network system, comprehensive integration of the system, between the entire factory area and the headquarters building, forming a large LAN monitoring and production system.

Workers do not need to go to the factory site to produce products, but sit in a monitoring room, through the computer network to the factory to give production instructions to various robots in the factory, the factory's intelligent robots can be according to the production controller instructions, produce the required products.

The maintenance engineer sits in front of the monitor, monitors the operation of each production robot, and once the robot fails, the robot is stopped, and then repaired, and the whole production process does not need a worker.

All of this has to be done through the network, which is only one step away from the idea of a "fingertip factory" in later generations, which belongs to three generations of semi-fully automatic factories.

In 1952, the American Ford Motor Company built the world's first fully automated plant for the production of engines in Cleveland, Ohio. It is known as the first generation of fully automated factories, which require pig iron and its raw materials to be fed from one end, and 42 automatic machines are used to carry out 500 different operations and processing, and are also able to check out substandard products.

Like the automatic production line in East Germany, it is a hard automatic production line, but the East German is obviously more advanced than it.

However, the real unmanned factory still emerged after the great development of robots, computers, electronic technology, etc., the most famous is a factory in Japan's "Fanak". It is known as the second generation of fully automated factories.

It was established in the early 80s with an investment of tens of millions of dollars to produce the components needed to manufacture robots.

This unmanned factory is located in a pine forest near Mount Fuji in Japan, and is a yellow building. In factories, automatic machining centers, robots, and automatic transport trolleys are produced unattended day and night.

The automatic machining center processes under the computer control of the control center; Automatic transporters move from one device to another, transport materials, move machine parts; Robots move quietly around the warehouse, and robots inspect and pack products...... On the 16,000-square-meter site, all work is controlled by computers according to procedures. The factory has 1,010 robots with vision, which work together with CNC machines and automatic transport trolleys. During the day, 19 workers work in the operation room, and at night there are only two monitors. An unmanned factory is not completely unmanned. There are other types of unmanned factories in Japan and other countries.

In 1998, the German Bavarian Automobile Manufacturing Company (BMW) built the world's first third-generation fully automated factory, which has initially had the prototype of intelligent manufacturing, and the whole factory is completely built on the basis of cloud computing and big data, which is commonly known as the digital factory.

The intelligent factory belongs to the fourth generation factory, and on the basis of the third generation factory, all the production links are connected with the industrial Ethernet, and part of it is connected to the Internet.

Ling Shizhe proposed that the local intelligent factory belongs to the third and fourth generation of fully automatic factory technology, and the fingertip factory belongs to the fifth generation, and the entire factory is connected to the Internet. It is characterized by the fact that the production operator does not have to sit in the monitoring room in the factory all the time, he can travel anywhere in the world, and when he receives a production task, he can simply click with his finger through his smartphone, and the factory on the other side of the world can receive his production instructions. And the monitoring can also be done through your mobile phone, so you don't have to stay there all the time, you can travel or play while working. This is the fingertip factory concept.

After listening to Christopher's reasoning, Foster knew that he had won, because Foster knew his young boss too well, and he would definitely follow Christopher's advice, buy it back and study it, digest it, absorb the advanced mechanical design concepts on it, and then use it in a new machine.

So he cleared his throat and said, "Okay Christopher, I'll report your suggestion to the boss." That's it for today, it's late, let's all rest. ”

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