Assembly Lines
GM Joint Venture Debuts New Auto Manufacturing System
The Intelligent Island Manufacturing System is 30 percent more efficient than traditional automotive assembly lines.
LIUZHOU, China—SAIC-GM-Wuling (SGMW) has ramped up a new automotive production process that replaces the traditional assembly line with a fully flexible, AI-driven, advanced manufacturing model that provides enhanced efficiency, precision and quality. The Intelligent Island Manufacturing System (I²MS) is a radical departure from the century-old linear line paradigm.
SGMW claims that the new flexible island design in its factory results in a 30 percent increase in manufacturing efficiency and a 31 percent reduction in unit costs, in addition to 100 percent full-lifecycle product data traceability. I²MS also improves production efficiency by 30 percent and reduces product development cycle by 43 percent.
“With I²MS, we’re building a system that gives us more room to adapt, faster responses to market shifts, better ways to uphold quality and the flexibility needed in China’s fast changing intelligent new energy vehicle era,” says Vincent Wong, executive vice president of SGMW. “It reflects our ongoing efforts to explore what the future of intelligent manufacturing could look like.
“Combining decades of manufacturing expertise with digital transformation strategy, [our] unique I²MS represents a fundamental reinvention of the traditional automotive linear assembly model,” claims Wong.
The system restructures conventional lines into multiple independent assembly islands across manufacturing processes. More than automated, intelligent guided logistic vehicles coordinate real-time component delivery across islands, enabling multiple processes to run in parallel.
Unlike the traditional linear assembly, which requires long changeover times and fixed production models, the fully flexible, reconfigurable I²MS system supports high-mix manufacturing, enables rapid model changeovers and can accommodate diverse customer configurations with ease.
SGMW’s self-developed EOAI (excellence operation artificial intelligence) big model acts as an “intelligent brain” that support flexible manufacturing and enables production capacity to scale seamlessly with market demand.
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“I²MS is helping strengthen our operational foundations,” notes Wong. “It positions us well as we accelerate toward a more electric, data-driven and intelligent product portfolio.
“The I²MS system elevates manufacturing precision to a new height, ensuring high quality, high-reliability performance for every vehicle produced,” says Wong. “The general assembly shop has 34 unmanned assembly islands, including batteries, window and seating. It achieves an industry-leading 50 percent automation rate.
“The body plant also hosts a cluster of manufacturing innovations and massively adopts leading technologies, including 3D vision, laser radar measurement, and AI-powered automated inspections to improve accuracy and achieve consistent quality across every vehicle,” adds Wong.
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