Contributed by Kang Xiang
In the book Understand the Strategy of Made in China 2025, the finance writer Wu Xiaobo said, “The time of ‘good stuff at cheap prices’ is over” for Chinese industry.
To some extent, people may feel reluctant and unwilling to end that time. However, the end of that time is a must for industrial upgrade and is the reality that Chinese economy and industry must face.
Industry is the foundation for a nation’s economic development and social progress. Since the beginning of the reform and opening up, China has been steadily dedicating to developing manufacturing. Therefore, it became the biggest manufacturing country in the world in 2010.
Based on this situation, the economist Robert Allen believes that China being the champion of manufacturing output represents “an end to a 500-years cycle in the economic history”. Some people even think that America “should be worried” once their championship which has been occupied since 1895 is captured by China.
However, Chinese industrial circle remains calm after the victory. Many years ago, they have been thinking about the solutions for China to get rid of the dilemma where its manufacturing is big but not strong. In the past, we “sold 800 million T-shirts to import only one airplane”. This sad truth always reminds us of tackling these difficulties.
But the question is what is our solution?
A start point for the new industry
Judging from the experience of traditional industrial giants such as America, German, and Japan, data has become the core factor in manufacturing development, pushing forward industry development into a new era.
With deepening integration of communication and information technology, the modern industry enters the digital era..In the plants, ten thousands of machines make productions at all speed. Those who can understand the operating principles and find the secrets of data will become the leader of the industry.
Traditional industrial machines cannot “see” or “hear” human beings, let alone communicating with people. Obviously, they are not the future of our times, and are far away from intelligent manufacturing.
But the good news is that we have the Internet of things (IoT). The most simple definition of IoT is that it can connect anything with the network to exchange information and communicate, realizing intelligent identification, location, tracking, monitoring, production, and management.
With IoT, traditional machines can “see” and “hear” people without destroying the past industrial facilities and platforms. It is a protection of human social wealth because destroying those facilities which costed millions of Renminbi will damage all parties’ interests.
However, although it is simple to collect data through IoT, the processing of these data is difficult. Under the past centralized computing mode, all data should be processed in data centers, which leads to some unavoidable problems.
For example, in the industrial application scenarios, much remote data needs to be processed and responded immediately. However, after being processed and transmitted to a data center and returning to front-end units, the data depreciate and are even “transformed”, losing all the values.
If these data still needs to return to the front-end unit, it is not a big issue for the center computing but higher bandwidth needs to be consumed during the transmission, which will increase the unnecessary overall costs for the enterprise. Then, what would these companies do in terms of pursuing digital transformation and high efficiency?
The solution of edge computing catches people’s eyes.
Under this new computing mode, all data which needs to be processed locally in real time does not need to be transmitted to data centers. Instead, the data can be computed and analyzed locally. Therefore, the value of the data remains and the future of smart manufacturing becomes brighter.
Edge computing does not prevent a center computing node (it is often a cloud computing platform) from accessing to edge historical data. This access might be an authentication “after transmission” rather than the direct operating command delivered by the center to the edge.
Obviously, edge computing is the start point of new industry and will last long from the beginning of the new industrial time to the end.
Edge Computing Consortium (ECC) comes into existence.
It is easy to illustrate edge computing, but actually edge computing is of great significance.
As the bridge connecting physical world with the digital world, edge computing is the convergence point of ICT industry and OT industry. Problems such as cross-industrial technology integration and collaboration issues need to be solved. As a result, all kinds of vendors and organization on the industrial chain should cooperate with each other to promote the overall development of the industry.
On 30 November in 2016, six institutions including Huawei, Shengyang Institute of Automation of Chinese Academy of Sciences, China Academy of Information and Communications Technology, Intel Cooperation, ARM, and iSoftStone jointly found the Edge Computing Consortium (ECC).
Last Year’s Launch Ceremony of the ECC
At the launch ceremony of the ECC, the director of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology stated that during the upgrade of the traditional manufacturing industry to become more intelligent, it is necessary to use edge computing technology to intelligently connect production equipment in workshops. This improves efficiency and promotes innovation.
Edge computing is an open platform that integrates the core capabilities of networks, computing, storage, and applications. It provides intelligent services at the nearest device. The application program is initiated from the network edge to generate faster network service responses. This meets the basic requirements of the industry in terms of real-time services, application intelligence, and security and privacy protection.
In this mode, the machine tools, robots, peripheral devices, and sensors in the automation system can be connected and advanced data analysis can be performed. This improves the production quality, efficiency, flexibility, and device reliability during production, thereby improving the overall equipment effectiveness (OEE) of devices and increasing the production profit.
By leveraging the resources and capabilities of edge computing, virtual spaces and physical entities are closely integrated. In the industrial manufacturing field, IoT, Big Data, and cloud computing are required to achieve digital manufacturing, network-based collaboration, and intelligent transformation.
To some extent, edge computing is a supplement and extension of cloud computing. Neither can replace the other, but they can enhance each other. The essence of digital transformation of enterprises is to process and unearth massive amounts of data. Without cloud computing or edge computing, this transformation would be ineffective.
The establishment of the ECC allows industry to span multiple fields, such as OT, IT, and CT. In the year since the ECC was established, it has gained more than 130 members, including a large number of world-famous companies, such as Mitsubishi, Bosch, Schindler, Schneider, Infosys, McAfee, ABB, and Stratus.
In a short period of time, the ECC started agendas such as technical architecture development. The ECC did much work in promoting horizontal decoupling and platformization. In addition, it has built a batch of test beds involving industrial manufacturing and actively made attempts in industrial robot predictive maintenance and test bed IoT.
Giant Layout Unfolded
More and more technology and industrial enterprises are beginning to be aware of the huge potential of edge computing. The industry application scenarios of edge computing are various and there is much industrial value for all parties. It can help the manufacturing industry to transform business models from product-oriented to service-oriented.
Enterprises such as Cisco, HPE, GE, Mitsubishi, and SAP, have tried to expand edge computing technologies into industrial manufacturing. Competition focuses on ecosystems, with each vendor acting in accordance with their own advantages. Edge computing has become the core.
However, vendors may have different names for this. For example, Micro Cloud and fog computing are, in essence, indistinguishable from edge computing. They all provide computing on the applications close to the site.
Edge computing provides the most powerful driving force for IoT. In the past few years, the development of IoT has been underwhelming, with the idea of IoT being more significant that its implementation. However, edge computing solution directly brings IoT into the period of application explosive-growth, and this new industry pattern is about to emerge.
The establishment of the ECC combines the strongest vendors in multiple fields such as OT, IT, and CT in the industry with research and organizations from the automation and transport protocol fields. Each party draws on the others’ experience, together promoting the actual application of edge computing in the industry field.
From the perspective of integrating industry value chains, the ECC proposed CROSS: leveraging Connections, to implement Real-Time services, Data Optimization, Smart applications, and Security and privacy protection.
In addition, the ECC offers users value and opportunities at the network edge, which is a core focal point of ECC members.
ECC members are also abandoning sectarianism. They are actively cooperating with major players in the industry field. This year, for example, at the Hannover Messe—the world’s largest industrial exhibition—Huawei, as a founding member of the ECC, joined hands with the leading industrial Internet software company GE Digital to release the industrial predictive maintenance solution based on industry cloud. This attracted great attention from the industry.
The new solution seamlessly integrates Huawei’s edge computing IoT (EC-IoT) solution and GE’s industrial Internet cloud platform Predix, quickly implementing end-to-end interconnection between industrial devices and cloud applications, real-time monitoring of device statuses, data analysis and insights, and intelligent decision-making for maintenance.
It is important to understand the Made in China 2025 strategy. However, using edge computing as a catalyst for the industrial development in China and even the world is more significant.
It has been almost one year since the establishment of the ECC. At the upcoming Edge Computing Industry Summit 2017 to be held on November 29, we will be able to hear more valuable information.
Register online:
https://www.ecconsortium.net/meeting/ECIS2017/english.html
The post Edge Computing—Empowering Enterprises in the New Industrial Era appeared first on Huawei Enterprise Blog.
Source: Huawei Enterprise Blog
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