BEACON unlocks potential of AI innovation for BMW in China

German carmaker BMW has launched an artificial intelligence platform named BEACON to provide AI-related innovation services in China. The move comes as it intensifies its efforts to promote digital transformation of the manufacturing industry and digital development in the world's largest vehicle market.

BEACON is an acronym for BMW, E2P (emerging to product), AI Algorithm, Computer Vision, OR (object recognition) and NLP (natural language processing). It acts as a "super brain" for production and company operations, which integrates the advantages of AI and the industrial internet of things to realize solutions across a multitude of business scenarios, the carmaker said.

When BMW IT engineers in Nanjing, Jiangsu province, need to develop an AI application, they no longer need to build a physical data center with a certain amount of computing power locally. Instead, they can simply enter the training code and parameters into the BEACON platform online, and start the task to obtain computing resources and conduct algorithmic training.

After nearly three decades of development, BMW has established a comprehensive layout in China. Its R&D and digital network includes locations in Beijing, Shanghai, Nanjing and Shenyang in Liaoning province, and is the most extensive of the company outside Germany.

BMW has also built up its largest production base globally in Shenyang. In 2022, two new large-scale plant extensions were opened in Shenyang under the BMW iFACTORY strategy, and the company committed a further 10 billion yuan ($1.43 billion) to expand battery production at the base.

The annual production capacity of BMW's Shenyang production base is about 830,000 units.

To date, BMW has served more than 6 million Chinese customers and the total number of My BMW App users in China has exceeded 7 million.

All these numbers harbor a huge data volume and data processing need, providing perfect conditions for cloud computing, big data and AI application development.

To meet the increasing demand for digital applications from business departments, BMW IT has proposed a Platform Strategy in China, aiming to provide different cloud computing services to help IT engineers quickly develop digital applications and respond to business needs in time. BEACON has been set up with this strategy.

Franz Decker, president and CEO of BMW Brilliance Automotive, said: "Digitalization is a strategic priority for BMW Group. The development of BEACON, our highly sophisticated AI platform, demonstrates our strong digital integration capabilities. The potential to deploy the AI platform across different business scenarios is a significant boost for our digital innovation capabilities here in China.

"China has created an excellent environment for digital innovation, which is an important basis for industrial upgrading and high-quality development. At BMW, we will continue to leverage our digital manufacturing strengths and work together with our Chinese partners to help accelerate China's industrial transformation," Decker said.

In Shenyang, BMW follows the BMW iFACTORY production strategy with the principles of "Lean, Green and Digital" and integrates cutting-edge technologies in production. So far, the BMW Shenyang production base has launched about 100 AI applications.

At Plant Lydia, BMW's newest production location in China, its design and layout, production line planning and equipment commissioning were all virtualized ahead of construction. It has a new data center with an area of 3,500 square meters and a 5G network covering the whole plant. Its 1,600 multifunctional cameras generate more than 10 petabytes of data every year. All this provides BEACON with an excellent stage to excel on.

Take Computer Vision as an example. BEACON will soon be able to access more than 6,000 cameras at the Shenyang production base. IT engineers can use the images captured by these cameras to develop AI algorithms and applications for target detection, target tracking and image classification.

They can also use these images to do model training and improve the accuracy of AI algorithms. For instance, in high-voltage battery production, images of raw material packaging are captured and sent to BEACON via a 5G network. Then the image classification algorithm deployed on BEACON reads, compares and determines if the information is correct.

The platform is also highly universal and scalable. It can even develop NLP algorithms for certain production scenarios to support the development of in-car speech recognition technology.

In the future, BEACON will utilize blockchain, quantum computing and multimodal fusion as well as other technical modules to bring more possibilities to BMW's digital innovation in China, the carmaker said.

caoyingying@chinadaily.com.cn