BYD and Huawei build smart factories together

Advertorial BYD is a high-tech company devoted to technological innovations that can create a better life. It is committed to building a greener world driven by new energy.

For over 20 years, BYD has been innovating in technologies, practicing customer-centricity, and pursuing the highest quality. Thanks to this relentless perseverance, BYD has delivered millions of reliable, high-quality vehicles since it entered the auto industry in 2003, including more than 4 million new energy vehicles (NEVs). In 2022 alone, BYD sold 1.86 million NEVs, ranking top among all NEV brands worldwide. As of May 2023, BYD had sold over 4.3 million new energy passenger vehicles worldwide. Furthermore, the quality of its products has been proven beyond doubt.

BYD has been exploring markets outside China since 1998, when it set up its first international branch in the Netherlands. To date, BYD has provided services (batteries, solar energy, energy storage, rail transport, NEVs, electronics, and more) for customers in more than 70 countries, including Japan, Germany, Australia, Brazil, Singapore, and Thailand. This year, BYD has already exported nearly 100,000 vehicles, and is ramping up its global market expansion.

Rapid business development tests BYD's network infrastructure

Against the backdrop of manufacturing upgrading, BYD's automobile and electronics businesses have seen rapid development. In 2022, BYD was included in the Fortune Global 500, ranking third by market value among global automobile companies.

To support rapid development, the automaker needs to migrate more design, R&D, and application systems to the cloud. Many kinds of terminals also need to connect to the network, with more production line terminals requiring wireless access. And with the number of network devices on the rise, huge pressure is placed on manual O&M. These changes are posing enormous challenges to BYD's campus network infrastructure.

First, diversified applications and cloud adoption for many production and R&D services mean higher requirements are placed on network experience. For example, intermittent interruptions of R&D simulation slow down the R&D process, and freezing or disconnections during HD video conferences affects communication experience and work efficiency. Therefore, one key question to consider is how to build a high-quality network for various services.

Second, the flexibility of BYD's production lines is becoming increasingly dependent on a wireless network. Wireless access has become a common demand of all kinds of devices on the production line. When a large number of devices access the network, the signal strength and roaming coverage of APs, the number of devices that can be supported by one network, anti-interference capabilities, and network reliability in high-density scenarios will be greatly challenged.

Third, as more wireless devices access the network, they start to outnumber wired devices. BYD currently has over 100,000 wireless devices on the network. It is necessary to ensure ubiquitous access and consistent permissions within and across campuses. However, traditionally, the permissions of wired devices are controlled based on IP addresses. This may lead to inflexible permission configuration, an increasingly prominent issue that is in need of resolution.

Finally, automated network O&M must be added to the agenda. As more devices are connected, the scale of the network expands and, user queries and network issues also increase. Therefore, BYD urgently needs to transform its labor-intensive, passive O&M into proactive, automated, and intelligent O&M.

BYD has chosen Huawei to help it build a 10Gbps network based on Huawei's High-Quality 10 Gbps CloudCampus solution. This network features ultra-fast access, superb experience, simplified architecture, and simplified O&M.

Ultra-fast access: Higher bandwidth for more efficient production

In production scenarios, an increasing number of BYD's R&D and production systems rely on high-bandwidth networks. For example, R&D simulation generates huge HD rendering workloads, which requires transmission of huge volumes of data between cloud servers and local terminals. In addition, simulation and rendering synchronization raises requirements for low network latency.

In office scenarios, multi-region collaborative working and remote HD video conferencing are common needs, and these require high bandwidth and low latency.

To meet the preceding requirements, BYD and Huawei came together to design a 10Gbps campus network based on Huawei's High-Quality 10 Gbps CloudCampus solution which features:

- 10GE for wired terminals: Access switches support on-demand GE and 10GE downlink to meet the needs of different devices, as well as network slicing to allocate different "lanes" for different services.

- High-density 10GE aggregation and 100GE core: To increase access bandwidth and connect more devices, the aggregation and core switches need to provide high-density 10GE and 40GE/100GE ports.

This ultra-broadband network ensures ultra-high-speed wired bearing to meet the ever-increasing service requirements, such as high bandwidth and low latency, greatly improving BYD's working and production efficiency.

Wireless working and production for enhanced speed and flexibility

For office scenarios, Huawei and BYD jointly built a high-quality wireless office network with APs that offer 10GE uplinks, high throughput, and high concurrency. Supported by leading AI technologies such as smart antennas, 3D network planning, and big data–enabled optimization, network signals are available to every BYD employee. Users can roam anywhere with zero service interruptions, and enjoy a smooth experience without video freezing.

Many production scenarios, such as battery and semiconductor production and warehousing, require wireless networks for backhaul. Various types of terminals need to be connected, like barcode scanners, dashboards, tablets, AGVs, and automated robots. Moreover, network bandwidth and latency are critical to realizing automated and paperless operations of so many terminals and facilities on production lines, in workshops, and in warehouses.

To address these needs, BYD conducted site surveys with Huawei's advanced 3D network planning tool and deployed Huawei's next-generation APs, which offer greater stability, faster access, and higher concurrency. These APs can also be used for IoT, connecting over 500 work-in-process vehicles and thousands of smart terminals and sensors. Furthermore, big data technology and regression algorithms are adopted to proactively monitor hundreds of devices, providing a more reliable network for the wireless backhaul of production data.

Besides offering superb experience at the network and application layers, Huawei's High-Quality 10 GbpsCloudCampus network solution also ensures touch-free terminal access and free mobility.

Huawei's iMaster NCE-Campus centrally stores the identity information of all BYD users, and performs centralized authentication and network authorization for all devices that access the company's office network. Currently, the system can support up to 300,000 users, and future scale-up is possible. iMaster NCE-Campus also supports free mobility. Refined network management, based on user roles and terminal types, prevent external users from accessing internal resources. Furthermore, different devices are granted different access permissions. Employees are given incredibly efficient access to the network, while information regarding the identity, location, and type of devices is intelligently identified to achieve refined management and provide customized network services.

Free mobility ensures consistent policies for wired and wireless access in any location. Moreover, group policies can be flexibly configured for dynamic user groups, static resource groups, and application-based groups for on-demand inter-group access. Through IP-group synchronization, core switches can execute free mobility policies to always guarantee consistent wired and wireless access policies across the entire network.

Simplified O&M: AI-enabled refined O&M instead of traditional O&M

Huawei's iMaster NCE-CampusInsight, an intelligent network analysis platform, applies AI to O&M. It employs telemetry to collect performance metrics and log data of network devices. Big data, AI algorithms, and other advanced analytics technologies are combined with scenario-based continuous learning and expertise to free O&M personnel from complex tasks of handling alarms and masses of logs. This visualizes the network experience of users and enables automated, intelligent O&M.

With this future-proof platform, network administrators can grasp the network experience of each Wi-Fi user and the status of each network device anytime, anywhere. When a fault occurs, it takes just a few minutes to locate the fault, identify the root cause, and provide effective solutions based on the fault inference engine, thus ensuring production and services are not interrupted.

In addition, the intelligent O&M system provides an automated network detection tool capable of automatically scanning over 9000 network devices used by BYD. This tool can automatically discover potential network risks, such as long network topology links, device EOS issues, and link bandwidth inversion (FE uplink and GE downlink). It can be used to scan networks of 70 campuses across five regions nationwide. Many hidden network risks are thus eliminated at a very early stage.

Since its commercial deployment, the intelligent O&M system has helped BYD improve network O&M efficiency by 48 percent with 60 percent fewer complaints against network faults, effectively avoiding economic loss caused by network faults.

Building a service traffic highway with high-capacity datacenter network

As an industry leader, BYD also needs a high-capacity datacenter network in addition to ultra-broadband, ultra-fast office and production networks. The company has deployed Huawei's most advanced CloudEngine 16800 series switches and CloudEngine 6800 series switches on its data center networks, creating a service traffic highway for interaction between hundreds of thousands of terminals and over 2000 servers across the entire network. These devices also offer powerful scalability, future-proofing the network for upcoming rapid service development.

The digital wave in the automobile manufacturing industry is now in full swing. BYD, as a key player in NEV, is leading technological innovation.

The successful commercial use of BYD's new 10Gbps network and high-capacity datacenter network has set new standards for sustainable NEV development and automakers' digital transformation. It also provides a valuable reference for helping manufacturers go digital using intelligent IP networks.

To achieve further development, BYD still needs to integrate processes and data by bridging data gap between R&D, production, and sales through data governance. This way, BYD can achieve efficient collaboration between production and supply, reduce costs, and enhance efficiency.

Based on its own manufacturing practices, Huawei has launched the Smart Factory Solution featuring one cloud, one network, one platform, and N applications. Huawei and BYD are also exploring comprehensive cooperation in developing digital production platforms and AI-powered quality inspection solutions.

In the future, Huawei will work with more customers to innovate designs and carry out in-depth service cooperation to connect even more industries and their corresponding scenarios.

Sponsored by Huawei.