Ministry of Industry and Information Technology: Focus on building two types of industrial Internet platforms

On April 10, I learned from the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology that on April 9, the Industrial Internet Platform System and Security System Construction Forum was held in Shenzhen, and An Xiaopeng, Deputy Director of the Information Technology and Software Services Department, attended the meeting.This conference is one of the series of sub-forums of the 6th China Electronic Information Expo. Representatives of local industrial and information technology departments, enterprises and institutions participated in the conference.

The industrial Internet platform is an important support for the construction of a modern industrial system and a welding point for building a strong manufacturing country and a strong network country. To implement the "Guiding Opinions of the State Council on Deepening "Internet + Advanced Manufacturing" Development of Industrial Internet", it is necessary to continuously deepen the development of industrial Internet. Understanding of the starting point, entry point, focus point, and foothold of industrial Internet platform construction.In the next step, Xinsoft will focus on promoting enterprises and industrial equipment to go to the cloud, and strive to build two types of industrial Internet platforms, three types of industrial APPs, four types of experimental tests, and four major support systems. A new ecology of manufacturing.

From printing and distributing the "Guiding Opinions on Deepening "Internet + Advanced Manufacturing Industry" Development of Industrial Internet" (hereinafter referred to as "Guiding Opinions"), to setting up a special group for industrial Internet, why does the country attach so much importance to industrial Internet?

Because the Industrial Internet is a new track for the competition of leading companies, from the perspective of the development stage of the global Industrial Internet, it is currently in a critical period of undetermined pattern, a window period of large-scale expansion, and an opportunity period to seize dominance.The opportunity is very rare, and the window period is also very short, so my country's manufacturing industry needs to seize this opportunity and accelerate the development of the Industrial Internet.

What exactly is an Industrial Internet Platform?

What exactly is the Industrial Internet platform at the core of the Industrial Internet? The "Industrial Internet Platform White Paper" gives the following architecture:

The architecture of the Industrial Internet platform can be summarized into the following four points:

1. Data collection (edge ​​layer) is the foundation, that is, to build an accurate, real-time and efficient data collection system, collect data, through protocol conversion and edge computing, part of it is processed on the edge side and returned directly to the machine equipment, Part of it is sent to the cloud for comprehensive utilization analysis, further optimization and decision-making.

2. Industrial PaaS (platform layer) is the core.That is to build an extensible operating system to provide a basic platform for industrial APP application development.

3. Industrial APP (application layer) is the key.That is to form application services that meet different industries and different scenarios, and present them in the form of industrial APPs.

4. IaaS is the support.That is, computing, storage, network and other resources are pooled through virtualization technology to provide users with measurable and flexible resource services.

Since 2013, various industrial entities around the world have actively deployed, and there are currently more than 150 industrial Internet platforms in the world.Since 2017, the development of the platform has entered a fast lane, and dozens of platform products have been released in my country alone.In terms of the layout strategies of domestic and foreign platform companies, there are currently four main paths.

1. Equipment and automation enterprises rely on the accumulation of industrial equipment and experience, and rely on the industrial Internet platform to innovate service models.For example, GE builds the Predix platform based on the open source PaaS architecture Cloud Foundry, and provides rich support for application developers by integrating the microservice architecture to realize the rapid construction, testing and deployment of intelligent applications.Sany Heavy Industry relies on its equipment management experience to incubate the tree root interconnection focusing on the construction of industrial Internet platforms, and builds a PaaS platform based on open source Docker technology. It has flexible application development and deployment capabilities, and provides asset management, predictive maintenance, product life cycle management, Industrial application services such as industry chain finance and model innovation.

2. Leading manufacturing enterprises transform digital transformation experience into service capabilities and build an industrial Internet platform.For example, Haier's COSMOPlat platform interconnects customer needs, product orders, cooperative production, raw material supply, product design, production assembly, and intelligent analysis, and conducts real-time communication and analysis to meet large-scale customization needs.The INDICS platform of Aerospace Cloud Network brings together more than 1 million enterprises, and on this basis provides services such as supply and demand docking, smart factory transformation, cloud manufacturing and resource sharing.

3. Software companies can expand their capabilities with the help of industrial Internet platforms based on their own business upgrade needs.For example, the Jingzhi UFIDA industrial Internet platform connects with Internet marketing and customers through the marketing cloud on the client side, and connects with suppliers through the procurement cloud on the supply side. Through the IoT platform, the terminal can quickly access different types of equipment for monitoring, thereby assisting customers to quickly connect equipment to quickly realize multi-terminal real-time services.The PTC Thingworx platform is based on a large number of design modules to realize product development and design, which greatly saves the design and development cycle.At the same time, the platform realizes the whole life cycle management of product production based on the CAD product digital model and the ThingWorx Studio augmented reality development environment and network experience service and digital twin service (Digital Twin) integrated with Vuforia technology.

4. Information technology enterprises will use their technological advantages to extend the existing platform to the manufacturing field.For example, the IBM Bluemix platform cooperates with Bosch to deploy Bosch IoT suite services on the platform, thereby helping IBM improve the IoT and data collection capabilities of underlying devices, and implement advanced device management services and cloud computing software updates based on data.The Microsoft Azure IoT platform focuses on creating service capabilities such as remote equipment monitoring, predictive maintenance, factory networking and visualization, and improving support for manufacturing scenarios.Huawei's OceanConnect platform uses gateway devices, software agents, and IoT management systems to collect and integrate various underlying data. It also provides API interfaces, development kits, and data analysis services to provide many high-value industry applications, such as smart homes and Internet of Vehicles. , smart meter reading, smart parking, safe city, etc.

As Yang Xueshan, former Vice Minister of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology said: Industrial Internet platforms are diverse, with different levels and types of platforms to meet different needs and achieve different values.Why is it said that it must be diversified? Because the manufacturing industry itself is diverse, and different industries and different scales have different physical systems, so the industrial Internet with the surname of workers and not the Internet must also be diverse.

Analyze the four application scenarios of the industrial Internet platform

1. Production process optimization for industrial sites

The industrial Internet platform can effectively collect and aggregate production site data such as equipment operation data, process parameters, quality inspection data, material distribution data, and progress management data. Optimized applications can be implemented in specific scenarios such as consumption management.

   2. Management decision optimization for enterprise operation

With the help of the industrial Internet platform, the production site data, enterprise management data and supply chain data can be connected to improve decision-making efficiency and achieve more accurate and transparent enterprise management. The specific scenarios include supply chain management optimization, production management and control integration, and enterprise decision-making management.

   3. Optimal allocation and coordination of resources for socialized production

The industrial Internet platform can realize the comprehensive connection between manufacturing enterprises and external user needs, innovation resources, and production capacity, and promote the parallel organization and collaborative optimization of design, manufacturing, supply and service links.Its specific scenarios include collaborative manufacturing, manufacturing capability trading, and personalized customization.

    4. Management and service optimization for the whole product life cycle

The industrial Internet platform can fully integrate product design, production, operation and service data. Based on the traceability of the whole life cycle, it can achieve manufacturability prediction in the design process, and health management in the use process. Feedback to improve product design.At present, its specific scenarios mainly include product traceability, product/equipment remote predictive maintenance, and product design feedback optimization.

What new technologies does the Industrial Internet platform bring to the manufacturing industry?

1. Industrial IoT platform empowers everything to connect to the future

The core of the industrial Internet platform is the Industrial Internet of Things. Through the Industrial Internet of Things platform, the interconnection of machines and equipment can be quickly opened up.In the era of PC Internet, the connection of billions of computers has brought about a revolution in information and transaction methods; in the era of mobile Internet, the connection of billions of mobile phones has brought about a revolution in social interaction and lifestyle; with the era of industrial Internet The arrival of the Internet of Things will realize the interconnection of all things at the level of tens of billions or even hundreds of trillions of trillions, which will surely bring a revolution to the way of production and distribution.

For the majority of manufacturing enterprises, the industrial Internet of Things platform can quickly realize the interconnection of more machines and equipment, and can continuously collect data from various equipment and machines to realize the integration of various data.However, the coexistence of new and old equipment in my country's manufacturing enterprises, intelligent upgrading and transformation will also be the intelligent transformation of old equipment (also called dumb equipment transformation) and the construction of new equipment and new applications at the same time.

2. Complementary coexistence of cloud computing and edge computing

In traditional IT architecture solutions, data is collected into various local business systems, and most of these systems are chimney-type, isolated business systems.The difference is that under the industrial Internet platform architecture, more and more data is gathered in the cloud, where data is centrally stored, managed and calculated.After data is uploaded to the cloud, enterprises can reduce IT operating expenses, open up the connection between traditional chimney-type business systems, and monitor the operation status of enterprises in real time anytime, anywhere.

However, in some industrial scenarios, the processing delay is required to be in the millisecond level, and the connection between the physical world and the cloud becomes unreliable.Edge computing provides network, computing, storage and other services close to the data source to meet the demands of enterprise digital transformation in terms of connectivity, intelligence, real-time, data optimization and security.As a bridge connecting the physical world and the digital world, edge computing enables intelligent assets, intelligent gateways, intelligent systems and intelligent services to become real-time, intelligent and reliable.

3. Artificial intelligence provides a smart brain for the Industrial Internet

Through the cloud of IoT data, enterprises have obtained a large amount of product life cycle data (big data), which has laid a good foundation for artificial intelligence based on big data + cloud computing.However, in general, the application of artificial intelligence in industry is still very limited, and there is a large space for development in the future.At present, there are many applications such as intelligent scheduling, intelligent detection, and equipment failure prediction.

The traditional production scheduling and scheduling system is a scheduling optimization algorithm based on rules and constraints.However, due to the complexity of production factors, failures, sick leave and other emergencies occur from time to time, so the application promotion is not very ideal.With breakthroughs in artificial intelligence algorithms, based on the monitoring data that the platform matches with resource capabilities, deep learning can be carried out to provide effective plans for manufacturing resource scheduling.The application of video image recognition method in appearance detection has been relatively mature.Based on equipment operating status data, applications such as predicting equipment failures and optimizing equipment operating status are also relatively mature.

The essence of the Industrial Internet is to apply big data, cloud computing, Internet of Things and other technologies to industrial enterprises, improve the core competitiveness of enterprises, promote my country's manufacturing industry to become stronger, and strive to become a manufacturing power as soon as possible.