Samsung SDS President Hong Won-pyo speaks at the Samsung SDS Intelligent Factory Media Day at Samsung SDS campus in Jamsil, Seoul, on Aug. 28. (Photo: Samsung SDS)

Samsung SDS is accelerating efforts to strengthen its Intelligent Factory business with its AI-based Nexplant platform. Samsung SDS held Media Day on August 28 and gave an overview of its Intelligent Factory business strategy, case studies, and the Nexplant platform.

As hundreds of thousands of terabytes of data are collected daily at manufacturing sites, there is an increasing demand for Intelligent Factory solutions that analyze and predict data through the application of new IT technologies such as AI, analytics, IoT and cloud.

Samsung SDS is implementing its Nexplant platform, which is specialized in manufacturing and IT technology, to provide customers with Intelligent Factory solutions in the 4 key manufacturing areas of facilities, processes, inspection, and logistics.

The Nexplant™ platform analyzes Big Data collected by IoT sensors installed in equipment through AI (Brightics AI) to not only improve real-time fault detection but also to predict the time of failure and optimally control and analyze the production process, thereby improving process quality by 30 percent.

The Nexplant platform adds Samsung SDS technology to the know-how of customers, while maximizing the defect detection rate through the application of the AI-based inspection/prediction model, thereby improving defect classification accuracy by 32% through learning defect types via deep learning.

In addition, the Nexplant platform enables self-operation at the shortest distance while moving material logistics equipment such as unmanned material conveyance machines an average of hundreds of thousands of kilometers per day in the factory.
It also analyzes the noise, vibration, heat, and location of material logistics equipment to detect, predict faults in advance, and automatically diagnoses and resolves the cause of abnormalities.

Samsung SDS plans to further enhance its AI-based Nexplant platform to provide Intelligent Factory solutions for outside customers in addition to affiliated companies, and the company plans to expand our business from plant design and construction to plant operation.

Lee Jae-cheol, leader of Samsung SDS Smart Factory Business Division, says, "We have enhanced our Intelligent Factory business based on the IT construction-based know-how and technological capability that we have accumulated over the last 30 years, and we will leap to become a leader in digital transformation."

According to Samsung SDS, worksites employing the NextPlant have reduced the time for analyzing the causes of abnormalities by 90 percent and improved the quality of products through process optimization by 30 percent.

Do Seung-yong, chief of the Electronic Manufacturing Business Team, said the worksites are overcoming the limits of the 5 percent sampling survey each plant employs. The Introduction of an AI-based virtual reality inspection that has an effect of the whole of the products raises yield and quality levels, he said.