Bridgestone develops AI-based manufacturing system

HIKONE, Japan—Bridgestone Corp. has developed and employed a tire building and molding system, dubbed “Examation,” that it claims uses artificial intelligence to heighten tire quality, productivity and uniformity.

The new system, being implemented at the company's Hikone factory, is based in part on and is thus considered an evolution of the Bridgestone Innovative and Rational Development production system that the Tokyo-based tire maker developed in the late 1990s/early 2000s.

The new system uses artificial intelligence to control the optimal placement of all components in a tire, Bridgestone said, which results in an improvement of uniformity of 15 percent or more.

The new system — Examation is derived from Evolutional/innovative X attractive plus autoMATION — further minimizes the amount of employee hands-on activity in the tire-building process, Bridgestone said, thus enabling “unprecedented” high-precision manufacturing. The new system also integrates the data generated in the tire-building process into the entire factory's operating system, thereby contributing to the process capability improvements of the entire plant.

According to a translation a Japanese press release, Examation uses a multi-drum building system that it claims yields twice the productivity of existing single drum methods.

Bridgestone said it intends to deploy the new system in new factories globally as they're built.

The company did not divulge how long it's been working on the system nor what it has invested to date in the development.