Mitsubishi Electric Corporation (TOKYO: 6503) announced today that together with Toshiba Mitsubishi-Electric Industrial Systems Corporation (TMEIC) they have developed a electrical motor-design support system incorporating Mitsubishi Electric’s Maisart®* AI technology to dramatically shorten the time required to produce electrical motor designs that achieve the same performance as conventional design methods deployed manually by skilled engineers. TMEIC plans to adopt the system for internal operations in FY 2024. The new system can be used to design electrical motors for pumps, compressors and fans application in
industries. When designing such motors, design engineers conventionally must repeatedly adjust design specifications to balance performance versus design, such as power efficiency versus motor size. For engineers with limited experience, it can be especially challenging to balance specifications to satisfy all requirements,
often requiring them to implement time-consuming trial-and-error testing, which later must be checked by skilled engineers.
Using the new system experimentally to perform design tasks that had already been completed in the past by engineers, Mitsubishi Electric confirmed that design time can be reduced to a mere three hours compared to one day for experienced engineers and up to three days for less experienced engineers (assuming one day
equals eight work hours). The system also helps to simplify and standardize design processes, since performance targets can be simply adjusted to have the AI generate appropriate new specifications. In addition, the system is expected to support the transfer of designing skills to less experienced engineers and help them
to become more proficient. The new system will be presented during a meeting of the Institute of Electrical Engineers of Japan at the Higashi Osaka campus of Kindai University as well as online on September 29-30.
Key Features of the product includes electrical motor-design support system achieves results equal to manually produced designs. Engineers input performance requirements and then the AI proposes the best specifications by referring to historical design data. Engineers can also check the AI-proposed specifications for performance, adjust targets if necessary to obtain finely tuned new AI-proposed specifications. The interactive process can be repeated until specifications that best
satisfy the final performance targets are achieved. The results are equivalent to conventional manually produced designs.
Another feature is performance-prediction and specification-optimization technologies dramatically cut design time. AI technology predicts electrical motor performance using design specifications accumulated in the past by TMEIC. Engineers can interact with the AI by fine-tuning performance targets to obtain precise specifications based on past designs that the AI searches and then optimizes. Design time is dramatically reduced from one to three days to just three hours.
The newly developed electrical motor-design support system will be introduced commercially at TMEIC in FY 2024. The time required for designing processes and production lead time are expected to become much shorter as a result of introducing the new system.
