Nine Core Technologies Support Industrial Internet

The topic of Industrial Internet was first proposed by GE in 2012. This topic and Industry 4.0 proposed by Germany later in 2013 can be said to have stirred the nerves of many companies. But these new ideas are not groundless. It is a powerful technology accumulation in the industrialized countries over the past few decades, as well as a new strategy after the integration with the Internet, a new technology layout and a new vision for the future. If we only interpret these visions and strategies from the Internet perspective, I think it is not enough. In fact, the Industrial Internet has strong technical support.

In the field of industrial Internet, we must have a solid technical foundation in order to achieve sustained and steady development. The following figure shows emerging and possible future technological elements in a structured way, so that everyone has a systematic understanding of the technology and system foundation formed by the Industrial Internet.

In this structure, the most basic is the industrial Internet standards and system security system, which is different from the mature commercial Internet and interpersonal Internet. The technical standards related to the Industrial Internet are far from being formed. It can be said that the game and competition among different technology camps. Is fiercely launched. Moreover, system security is a relatively weak link, which to a considerable extent hinders the opening of the industrial Internet and the exchange of data with each other. In the future, we can foresee that various industrialized countries, organizations and even enterprises, as well as scientific research institutions, will carry out a lot of work around the establishment of standards and the consensus and creation of system security.

These basic tasks are very important and strategic. Therefore, our Chinese entrepreneurial community must pay close attention to these basic tasks, and should abandon the simple wish that it may be hypothetical and hope to quickly curve overtaking. Without these basic tasks, it is impossible to achieve a truly industrial interconnection.

On top of this there are three very key technical components, one called a supercomputing terminal that is readily available everywhere. The so-called supercomputing terminal that is accessible everywhere is brought about by sensors, powerful chips and the resulting distributed powerful computing capabilities. This is due to the popularity of chip technology and the expansion of IPV6's addressing capabilities.

The second kind of component basis is what we call a software-defined machine. The so-called software-defined machine is a new prospect that emerged from the integration of powerful, ubiquitous supercomputing terminals and the various devices that we have used in the industrial era. Although the future hardware is important, software is more important. Hardware as a technology component, giving different functions to software, software defining hardware and defining the machine, will become the trend of the future.

The resulting data, patterns, methodologies, and artificial intelligence will be attributed to the automation of knowledge work, which involves a large number of new technologies.

Above these three technical components is a new type of industrial process. Future industrial processes will break through the process or be the traditional definition of discretization. With the deep involvement of robots, the process of industrial processes and industrial production will be fundamentally changed. Industrial production will become a truly non-stop process, because robots are not fatigued, and robots will conduct in-depth exchanges and automated processing, making the production efficiency breakthrough the bottleneck of human intervention, reaching a new peak.

In the field of distributed production, 3D printing, as a representative of distributed production, will become a new star, and it will make individuals and organizations become one node in the middle of large-scale production, completely changing the way of mass production in the past, which will redefine Future industrial processes.

These technical elements are very important, and they are forming components and technical support for future industrial basic technologies. I will briefly analyze the nine aspects below. There are some technical events and trends that are happening. And more are some of the new technologies, measures, and trends that are being considered for adoption by humans and are worth our serious attention. In short, the Industrial Internet is not just the Internet; it is a comprehensive application of more traditional technologies in the new era. Everyone who does business should pay attention to this complex and integrated whole, impact on us and new opportunities.

1, supercomputing terminal

Supercomputing terminals are some new smart devices, such as cars and wearable devices, such as underwear with chips. The surging momentum of these products is becoming a new member of the physical world we are familiar with. The core of these products is a powerful chip. Intel, the chip king in the traditional sense, is realizing that he is no longer in the turbulent era of mobile Internet. For example, the ARM chip architecture, with the emergence of a company represented by Apple Inc., is replacing the traditional king of Intel in the PC era.

The super-smart terminals that are accessible everywhere are breaking through Moore's Law's imagination. Moore's Law has predicted that the computing power of the chip will double and the price will drop by half within nearly two years. This was the reverie that Intel Corporation had proposed in 1965. Nearly 50 years have passed and this Moore's law has not yet seen the end. Even if Moore's Law meets the bottleneck at the nano level, new alternative technologies are emerging. And with the unlimited expansion of IPV6's addressing capability, we humans can expect that every smart terminal in the future can have powerful computing and addressing capabilities, so these two key technical elements in the Internet of Things era are already available.

In addition to the chip technology competition, there is competition for entry into the interactive internet standard in this industry. There are some industrial giants that are forming industry alliances. For example, it includes Samsung, Nest, and Google Inc. Nest was acquired by Google Inc. in 2014 for US$3.2 billion. This company can provide energy feedback systems, so there are huge home users in the United States, and this provides a convenient channel for Google's energy management system into the home. At the same time, Apple appeared in the market. In June 2014, Apple announced the Homekit framework.

The Homekit framework was integrated into the iOS 8 system released by Apple, and was supported by giants such as Philips and Honeywell. Apple is hoping to enter the smart home area through Homekit. In the field of smart homes, there has been a lack of strong integrators for the past few decades. With the strong entry of companies like Apple Inc. and Google Inc., this situation is being broken, including Haier Inc. has also become the first to satisfy the IOS entry certification standard MFi. Chinese company.

The supercomputing terminal is everywhere, but it is also the field of the Internet of Things. Recently, there have been some major events, especially with regard to the emergence of technology trends and standards. The industrial operating system Predix that GE Company is introducing, this industrial operating system obtains the support and the participation of a lot of American traditional enterprises. GE has positioned it as an industrial operating system. Everyone knows ambition and the impact on the future industry. Including China's Huawei Corporation also launched the LITEOS system, hoping to have a place in the field of the Internet of things, the layout of these top companies in this regard, it is hope that in the basic standards, and access to interactive protocols occupy a leading place.

2, the software definition machine

After Apple released the iPhone, software-defined machines caught everyone's attention in the industry. Before this, the traditional feature phone was defined by the manufacturer's function settings. After Apple released the iPhone, its real function set was set by users through downloading software, which brought great inspiration to a large number of industrial enterprises. Because of this, Nokia, once the king in the communications era, was quickly pulled down. And on behalf of the new industry thinking, Apple Computer, which uses software-defined hardware to bring new features and functional ideas, has won from behind.

Software-defined hardware, reciprocity out of communications and electronic products, has become the future and normal state of the industry. I think the answer is certain. The reason is very simple. In today's era of increasingly low thresholds and homogenization of hardware products and machinery and equipment, it is software that can truly differentiate itself. This is a trend in the future, and various embedded software and additional software functions will become more and more inexpensive. The development of software products will become more and more platform-oriented, and the upgrading and maintenance of software products will become more and more cloudized. . This trend will help manufacturers to quickly launch products and upgrade products according to consumer needs. Consumers and industrial users will also use such advantages to obtain cheap services and fast products, as well as remote maintenance services. .

On this basis, future products will become service-oriented, and there are two particularly obvious trends in this service. One is service software, and the second is product personalization.

The so-called service software is the real industrial product that tends to be standardized and modularized. It will replace the past sales of products by way of service interaction. In this change, I think it is the two industries that bear the brunt of this. One is the automotive industry and the other is the household appliance industry. In the automotive industry, the popularity of taxi software now allows us to see the future trends and trends of this matter. Will the auto industry become a service industry in the future, and will automakers become providers of service providers? Will they be more and more distant from consumers? I think many people in the auto industry today will Deep fear, because this will usher in a wave of fierce industrial revolution.

The second important trend is product personalization. Product individuation means that consumers and customers can use the software platform Internet in the future to customize their own products, and can upgrade products through remote software maintenance. What is currently emerging is the medical industry, the remote maintenance of medical care and even diagnosis. Including our commonly used household products, clothing customization, and even cosmetics and other personalized products will be popular. This is the appearance of the so-called C2B model in the previous period. In my book "Industrial Internet", it was mentioned that Siemens used this method to implant a new manufacturing process for the artificial knee joint.

3, automation of knowledge work

The third key technical component I call Knowledge Work Automation. This concept was pioneered by McKinsey in 2013. McKinsey & Company predicts that there will be a total of 12 disruptive technologies in the future. They unexpectedly ranked "automation of knowledge work" second. Here, the automation of knowledge work refers to the automation of information processing. It covers a wide range of topics, including conventional Internet information interaction, pattern recognition, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and other cutting-edge technologies. This new type of work based on information and knowledge, according to McKinsey estimates, will have very large economic value in the future. It is predicted that by 2025, a new economy of nearly US$6 trillion will be added to increase value, and output capacity equivalent to more than one billion full-time employees will be created.

In this area, we must mention in particular artificial intelligence. Because artificial intelligence is now highly concerned by many research institutions and companies, he believes that he is one of the technologies that can truly change the key of humanity in the future. For example, IBM is a very important participant in artificial intelligence. Their most famous experiment was that in 1997 they produced computers that defeated human chess masters. The latest result is intelligent computers, which they call intelligent computers. This computer helps legal service companies to analyze the texts of law firms; it includes the analysis of hospital medical reports. A lot of people have been replaced, so the development of artificial intelligence puts forward a new test for people's work in the future and it is also a challenge.

However, the development of artificial intelligence is closely related to algorithms, and this algorithm is closely related to big data technology. Therefore, only big data does not make sense. The key is to have a relationship with the algorithm. It can be said in the aspect of algorithm breakthrough that the industry is still in a very early stage. The reason is that in the traditional industrial industry, the adoption of algorithms is not advanced. Those that have a large number of production simulations, including some smart processing algorithms, are elementary. Whether it is the traditional analog method or the artificial method of using the human brain, artificial intelligence methods are very early experimental stages. It should be said that every industrial enterprise is carrying out an algorithm and updating the original production mode with new algorithms, including simulating aspects of the original production and design, and there is a lot of space for excavation.

The algorithm will drive the further development of chip technology, especially the chip that simulates human brain work. IBM also achieved a key breakthrough in this area. In the second half of 2014, IBM announced that they had released a new generation of chips that became neuron-embedded, called Truenorth, which uses 5.4 billion transistors to simulate human brain function rather than traditional logical computing. Features. The development of artificial intelligence and the interactive rise of chip technology also provide a very strong technical foundation for the continued evolution of artificial intelligence in the future. Here, I particularly want to suggest that during the development of the industrial Internet, the algorithm-based innovation of each industrial enterprise is the most crucial, even exceeding the big data itself.

4, cross-enterprise standards development

Regarding the formulation of standards for the industrial Internet, it should be said that it is now the focus of competition among the world's major industrial companies and even countries. These companies and countries including Germany are aware of its high importance. For example, in the last 40 years of the last century, Germany's annual GDP growth of 3.3%, the standard contribution rate accounted for 0.9%, second only to capital investment, and more important than domestic innovation and direct purchase of technology. Therefore, mastering the standard discourse power is a very crucial step for these countries and even enterprises. In this regard, U.S. companies are also at the forefront of the world.

In April 2014, the establishment of the Industrial Internet Alliance led by five companies including GE, AT&T, Cisco, IBM and Intel was announced in Boston. This alliance has rapidly expanded to more than 100 member companies. U.S. companies have a high degree of advantages in software and the Internet. They also hope to establish some new implementation standards under the new industrial alliance, an open alliance cooperation framework. Just said that GE's software platform wants to become a de facto industry standard. Of course, this area is a fierce competition and game. The state and the corporate level are all making active arrangements. Chinese enterprises must not be excluded and must be involved. It is necessary to exert sufficient influence and right to speak on this standard and technology.
 5. Systematic Security of Industrial Internet

This topic is extremely important, but in today's wave of heat waves, everyone does not seem to make it a major event to see and analyze. In fact, a series of security incidents continue to occur. The most famous event in these years should be the Iranian government in 2011 that accused the United States and Israel of the preparation of Trojan horse software. This software passed Siemens’ nuclear power control system SCADA and entered Iran’s nuclear facilities. These softwares are used to design attack management software. This kind of Trojan horse was called by the Iranian government as a digital missile. These things may not have been as serious as theirs, but these things have given us very important safety tips.

After the industrial Internet has gradually emerged, it is really necessary to gain popularity among enterprises, including cross-enterprise, and security issues must be resolved. Imagine that if this problem is not resolved, not only these devices and infrastructure that are of great importance, but also areas such as smart homes and smart cars, will have huge potential security risks and privacy risks.

There are several angles to change the current state of system security. The first is the intrinsic safety of the intervention device. In other words, the device itself is used for industrial purposes, rather than for information or hacking. It requires a very high level of security certification. On the one hand, all standards alliances can carry out security inspections and authorizations for their own access devices, just as they do for security certifications in various countries and regions.

The second is about network security. The acquisition of information and the security of data must establish strict specifications and adopt the most advanced technology to prevent them. Obtaining and tampering with information is the primary goal of many cyber attacks. In the era of industrial Internet, this information is not only distributed in the cloud, but also exists in supercomputing terminals, mobile internet terminals, and sensors all over the world. Therefore, how to strengthen software protection and ensure the reliability of the security level is extremely important.

The third is to have more complete system security emergency measures, that is to say, when the system is attacked, fails or even crashes, it must have strong and rapid contingency plans and system recovery plans so that the original system can operate normally. Not to fail, obviously we are still far from ready in this respect.

6, robots change the industrial process

This topic is the hottest industrial topic nowadays. Robots appeared in the industrial world in the 1960s. The first generation of robots in the world was invented by the United States. Because the United States was facing severe employment pressure and the strong resistance of the Association, American companies were very cautious in using robots and did not enter the stage of large-scale use. Until the rapid rise of the Japanese auto industry in the late 1970s, American companies and European companies used robots to transform their existing production lines. Today Japan is the country with the largest number of robots. Japan employs 332 robots per million people.

This is the statistical data for 2012. At that time, Germany used 273 units. Germany is the country with the highest usage in Europe, and our country was only 10 at that time. Of course, the use and development of robots in China in the past two years should be very fast. Related companies are all introducing and manufacturing robots. For example, Foxconn has announced that it has achieved the goal of turning off lights production in 2014. This is critical in the coastal areas where labor costs are high, because the labor force's annual wage increase rate in the coastal areas of China is as high as 15% or more, and the annual price of robots has fallen sharply. This has made industrial robots popular.

But robots face a dilemma in China, that is, a large number of high-end robots, but also the world's major brands of the world. Mainly in the hands of companies in Japan and Europe. Some core technologies, software is not on the Internet, but on the basic reducer, controller, CNC system, these areas are the traditional industrial and intelligent hardware, embedded software world. Like the reducer, China needs to import. While foreign companies adopt new strategies in this round of competition, key components have taken high-price measures for Chinese companies, making Chinese companies' production costs remain high.

For example, a reducer may account for more than 35% of the robot's product value, and parts imported from foreign companies such as Japanese-made reducers are sold to China at prices three to four of their own use price. Times. Therefore, it can be seen that the prices of industrial robots have been significantly reduced at home. They hope that in this way, the Chinese robotics industry can be left behind from the very beginning, and the market can be quickly occupied by firmly controlling the market. In addition to the intelligent nature of the robot itself, the requirements for software systems and control systems are high. Therefore, after occupying the production line first, it is possible to occupy China's future factories through software and control systems.

In this field, China now attaches great importance, but the status quo is that 90% of the robots still come from foreign imports, and domestic companies also hope to quickly catch up. In the "Industrial Internet", I also introduced the current development trend, the approximate situation of each company. In U.S. companies, as the United States announced its Advanced Manufacturing Partner Program in 2011, they called AMP, which also explicitly proposed the development of third-generation smart robots based on the mobile Internet technology, including the strong acquisition of a lot of companies like Google Inc. Vision system related companies hope to establish a very powerful global industrial robot system in this respect. In this aspect, European companies, Japanese companies, and U.S. companies are at the forefront.

7, distributed production and 3D printing

On September 15 last year, the first 3D-printed car was introduced, which took only 44 hours and used 40 parts. The minimum price is 1.1 pounds. This small car officially opened a new chapter in the automotive industry. Recently, 3D printing has attracted great attention in China. Premier Li Keqiang also held a meeting last week, specifically emphasizing the importance of China's 3D printing for industrial reshaping and some of the future development strategies for 3D printing. It should be said that our country is not in a backward state, especially in a place like South China in South China, which has a globalized 3D printing production base and technology base as well as an innovation center.

Why is 3D printing important? Because of the changes he brings to the industrial Internet, the changes to the future industrial production methods will be disruptive.

First, it will be highly integrated with online design and offline production. The maker movement that is triggered by 3D printing is changing the way of production in the past. Everyone can purchase 3D printers online, put their ideas into practice, and realize distributed production. Make everyone's creative ideas possible.

The second trend is the lightweighting of entrepreneurial production, because the Internet entrepreneurship brought by 3D printing will lower the threshold for entrepreneurship, and the long-tail effect will be able to be revealed. Subdivided businesses can always find their own living space.

The third important trend in 3D printing is the diversification of production subcontracting. The small companies that come out of 3D printing are faster and faster than big companies. Although this type of manufacturing does not immediately subvert the existence of large companies, it can create more markets. In the middle of large-scale manufacturing, traditional manufacturing still occupies traditional advantages. However, small batches of personalized production may be impacted by, or even replaced by, future technology represented by 3D printing.

3D materials are currently the key bottleneck for widespread application of 3D printing. Because of the 3D printed materials, there are still many obstacles in strength and stiffness mechanical properties, including the roughness, moisture resistance, thermal stability, etc. of the printed products. In particular, the performance of these materials will further affect the heat treatment, surface physics and chemistry, and precision. Subsequent processes such as processing, polishing, coating, etc. directly affect the production cost and efficiency. In any case, this round of industrial development tide, 3D printing does provide a broad space for the distributed production and mass entrepreneurship that China now has, and it also forms an effective alternative to the original production methods and extreme production methods. .

8, the integration of human consciousness and the machine

Ultimately, can human beings use ideas to directly control machines and even other living organisms or even human beings? This idea actually existed for many years, and it seems that there have been some major breakthroughs in this field recently. In 2010, several scientists tried to link the testers of India and France together. When the words were converted into two-dimensional codes using the brainwave system, after the brainwave output of Indians was transmitted to France, they could be re-identified. In the end, the testee understood the word in France.

This technology, known as brain-computer interface, has existed for more than 30 years. In the era of industrial Internet, brain-computer interface technology has provided us with a huge imagination. Humans can not only interact with machines, but also have the possibility to control machines. What's more important is that, in turn, the machine can also read human thoughts and thus interact with humans deeply. At the Tencent WE conference that ended in 2014, the Japanese company launched a brainwave cat's ear product. This product is very simple to play. When people's emotions fluctuate, the cat's ears will stand up, and the emotions will hang down. At that time, the cat's ears will be picked up. In fact, it is a simple operation to test alpha waves generated by human emotion fluctuations, or beta waves.

Behind this, it is apparent that human beings are making inroads into brain technology research. Even President Barack Obama personally approved a research plan for investing 100 million U.S. dollars in 2013, called the Advance Neuroscience Brain Research Project. The complexity of this plan is said to be comparable to human genetic planning.

In Vancouver, Canada, an innovative company that specializes in brainwave technology, they used to use the wearable brainwave controller to control the lights of the Málaga waterfall during the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics. , and the lights of the Toronto National Television. The application of this concept is also being applied in industrial applications, mainly for the monitoring of occupational safety. For example, in industries where attention is needed, when people's attention is lost, they are prompted to include such things as car driving, and there are special training industries that need such products. But this is only the beginning. The in-depth research and development of the human brain will be deeply integrated with the industrial Internet. This is an important technological trend that we need to pay attention to.

9, virtual world

With regard to this concept, the concepts in the Industry 4.0 system defined by Germans and German companies are called digital physics systems. This new manufacturing method actually allows us to see a future picture. That is, in the future, apart from the physical world, the corresponding integrated digital information systems, or virtual systems, will be highly interactive and interconnected with the physical world. The production, use, and monitoring of aero-engines carried out by GE are the collection, simulation, and processing of large amounts of data.

In the future, besides the physical world we live in, there is a virtual system that integrates more information. This virtual system will help us to predict and help us to maintain the current physical world. Their prediction accuracy may be high. Based on our reality-based forecasting accuracy. Because they have more information, and because they have mastered the information of the entire history, they will help us to carry out more effective, new and intelligent design and manufacture. So the German machine production machine is not a virtual topic in the future. It will really become a reality. So in the physical and virtual world, who is more powerful? I personally think that the virtual world will be more powerful, and the basis of the virtual world is digital, information, big data and software.