News release overview
Mitsui Chemicals and Hitachi Start Demonstration Test for Practical Application of MI Technology to Speed Up Materials Development
Realizing DX in new materials development; Established AI technology to reduce the number of experiments for organic material development by about 1/4
Tokyo, June 28, 2021 --- Mitsui Chemicals, Inc. (TSE: 4183, Mitsui Chemicals) and Hitachi, Ltd. (TSE: 6501, Hitachi) today announced that they have begun a practical demonstration test of materials informatics (MI) technology developed by Hitachi that utilizes artificial intelligence (AI) for actual development of new materials. Prior to the demonstration test, Hitachi's technology has been verified by using past organic material development records provided by Mitsui Chemicals, and it was confirmed that the number of experimental trials required to develop new high-performance compounds can be reduced to about 1/4 compared with that for conventional MI, shortening the development period.
This technology will be presented at the conference "DICOMO2021" (1) to be held on June 30, 2021.
In the future, Hitachi aims to establish this MI technology as a practical method for the "Materials Development Solution," (2) which is one of Hitachi's "Lumada" solutions with advanced technologies, to reduce time and costs for customers' and partners' development processes, and to strengthen their competitiveness. Mitsui Chemicals will continuously create innovative products, services, and business models in an agile manner to solve social issues through DX. Both companies will continue to promote collaborative creation (3) on materials development and contribute to realization of a sustainable society.
(1) Information Processing Society of Japan, "Multimedia, Distributed, Cooperative and Mobile (DICOMO2021) Symposium,"
(2) "Materials Development Solution" is one of Hitachi's "Lumada" solutions that accelerate DX, and is a service supporting the development of new materials for customers through MI. It mainly includes two services; (1) "Materials Data Analysis Environment Provision Service" - a cloud service that enables easy visualization and high-speed analysis of huge amounts of simulation data and experimental data related to materials development, and (2) "Materials Data Analysis Service" - Hitachi receives customer's materials data and develops optimal AI and other analytics tools for their R&D to perform analysis on behalf of the customer.
(3) Mitsui Chemicals and Hitachi have been collaborating on materials development using MI since 2017.
