The Industrial Internet in the United States and Germany are two completely different development paths, and their development strategies have their own deep considerations in the future manufacturing industry. The first camp of the manufacturing industry is still so proactive. If China fails to respond to trends in a timely manner, the gap will only increase.
In the past 20 years, the Internet has been the most important technology for changing society and business; now, with the rapid development of 5G, Internet of Things, cloud computing and big data, blockchain, and artificial intelligence technologies, the manufacturing field will begin to have The advanced ability to transmit and process big data has enabled the manufacturing industry to form an industrial Internet, driving subversion and reconstruction of traditional manufacturing industries.
United States: Relying on the leading edge of information technology to annex the manufacturing industry with the Internet
For a long time, almost all network platforms such as CPU, operating system, software and cloud computing have been controlled by the United States. In the past two years, Google has begun to enter the field of robots and developed self-driving cars; Amazon has entered the mobile terminal business, and began to implement the delivery of drones to deliver goods. The American Internet giant is accelerating from the "information" field into the "physical" business field. In addition, the United States General Electric, Cisco, In-tel, AT & T, etc. formed the "Industrial Internet Consortium (IIC)".
Various signs indicate that the United States will vigorously develop smart business in the industrial field in the future, and build a network connecting all elements of the industry and the entire industrial chain through the next-generation information and communication technologies such as the Internet and big data to achieve real-time collection and free circulation of massive industrial data Accurate analysis to support scientific business decision-making and efficient allocation of manufacturing resources.
That is to say, American companies are no longer satisfied with the business-to-consumer digital business field, but have begun to get involved in the business-to-business business field. Once the United States enters the real physical world of industry on a large scale, it will certainly control the market, and the industrial competitiveness of other countries will also be greatly reduced.
Germany: With Industry 4.0, use the Internet to open smart factories
Germany has always sought to maintain its world leading position in traditional manufacturing, and plans to combine it with a new generation of information technology in due course. If this is not the case, you will lose the opportunity to connect with the world in the Internet age. To this end, intelligent manufacturing in Germany's "Industry 4.0" strategy is associated with Internet technology everywhere.
The essence of Industry 4.0 is to realize the "smart factory" based on the "information physical system". At the production equipment level, real-time perception is achieved by embedding different sensors. Precise control of the entire process through broadband networks and data; at the production management level, a series of technologies such as Internet technology, cloud computing, big data, broadband network, industrial software, management software, etc. constitute the service Internet to realize the information perception Network communication, precise control and remote collaboration.
In the era of Industry 4.0, each product will carry all the information needed in its entire supply chain and life cycle to achieve traceability. Each production equipment will be inherited by the entire production value chain to achieve self-regulated production. The smart factory flexibly determines the production process. Different production equipment can not only cooperate with each other, but also respond quickly to external changes.
Therefore, the technical means of Industry 4.0 is the deep integration of Internet technology. The future manufacturing industry will be built on a collaborative platform based on the Industrial Internet, and more production factors will be further scientifically integrated. Internet technology is in production, management, The application of links such as transactions is continuously deepened, and flexible production, intelligent manufacturing and service-oriented manufacturing are increasingly becoming an important direction for the transformation of production methods.
China: Relying on the "Industrial Internet" to empower the transformation and upgrading of the manufacturing industry
It can be said that the industrial Internet in Germany and the United States are two completely different development paths. Through careful analysis of the industrial Internet development strategies of Germany and the United States, it is not difficult to find that Germany and the United States have their own deep thinking in the future manufacturing industry. The first camp of the manufacturing industry is still so proactive. If China fails to respond to trends in a timely manner, the gap will only increase.
In the era of industrial Internet, platform enterprises, networked organizations, open innovation, mass customization, and socialized production will become more common. Therefore, the interaction between producers and consumers will be closer, the role of SMEs will be more prominent, and rapid response to market demand will be more important. These changes require timely and appropriate institutional innovation and management reform capabilities, which poses a real challenge to China's relatively weak institutional innovation and management reform capabilities.
Therefore, in recent years, the Industrial Internet has received unprecedented attention in China. Industry authorities believe that the Industrial Internet is of strategic significance to the digital transformation and upgrading of China's manufacturing industry, achieving high-quality development of the manufacturing industry and enhancing international competitiveness. To transform from a manufacturing powerhouse to a manufacturing powerhouse, we must seize the industrial Internet platform Development opportunities. Network, platform and security constitute the three major industrial Internet systems in China. Network is the foundation, platform is the core, and security is the guarantee.
In the past, we thought that if we want to get rid of the low value-added situation of traditional manufacturing, we must extend to both ends of the "smile curve" R & D and service. It is necessary to upgrade the industry and develop the peripheral service industry of manufacturing through high-tech road. From an industrial perspective, the "research and design" link means the development of high-tech industries, and the "marketing and service" link is to increase the proportion of peripheral service industries in the manufacturing industry.
However, this process will encounter many challenges. It can neither substantially go out of the bottom of the smile curve nor in the short term. However, the industrial Internet era has arrived. Because the traditional value creation and distribution model of the manufacturing industry is changing. With the help of cross-border Internet platforms, enterprises, customers and stakeholders have participated in all aspects of manufacturing such as value creation, value transfer and value realization.
In this way, the Industrial Internet will revolutionize the manufacturing industry's "smile curve" value chain. Personalized customization gives the front-end R & D design to users; users place orders directly to the enterprise, which also weakens the back-end sales, thereby smoothing the smile curve and reintegrating into a value loop.
Start with three "CM"
Over the past few decades, with the abundance of various products, the manufacturing structure of the manufacturing industry has become more complex and elaborate. The information flow within the production line and production equipment, as well as the information volume of management work has increased dramatically, and the automation system has been unable to meet the needs of the manufacturing industry in terms of information processing capacity, efficiency and scale. The Industrial Internet will solve these problems to a certain extent. When the new format of the Industrial Internet began to enter the field of manufacturing, a new challenge also followed, that is, to shift the manufacturing industry from mechanization, electrification, and digitization to the challenges of networking and intelligent manufacturing.
Of course, with the national strategy, there is also a direction for the industry in the future. Along with this, there will inevitably be large-scale policy support in the next few years. However, the research on the direction of technology, especially in the theoretical innovation and industrial research of the Industrial Internet is not enough. The author believes that the industry and enterprises must start with three "CMs" to develop the Industrial Internet.
The first CM (Concurrent Manufac-turing, parallel manufacturing) refers to the parallelization, transparency and flattening of each process flow in the manufacturing industry to achieve a truly intelligent manufacturing. The parallelized intelligent manufacturing process will break through the limited constraints of the physical world resources by using the massive data and information resources of the network world. In this way, it is possible to design and research and develop, purchase raw material parts and components, and organize production and marketing while conducting marketing, thereby reducing operating costs, improving production efficiency, shortening product production cycles, and reducing energy use.
The second CM (Cloud Manufacturing) is simply a new manufacturing model and new method based on ubiquitous network, which realizes interconnection, service and personalization. , Production workshops, production equipment, capital, workers, etc.) are integrated online, attracting different enterprises in the upstream and downstream of the value chain to participate extensively in the design, production, service and other links to achieve the sharing and complementation of various resources.
C2M (Customer-to-Manufacto-ry, customer-to-factory) is a business model that surrounds consumers. Taking consumers as the center, by providing their own standardized modules for consumers to selectively combine, it is a "pull" The "type" supply chain system, with the help of the industrial Internet platform, has formed the ability to lead the global industry chain, and then realized the rapid production of multiple varieties of customization through intelligent manufacturing.
Troika: 5G, artificial intelligence and blockchain
In short, in the era of Industrial Internet, Internet technology will be fully embedded in the industrial system, and it will break the traditional production processes, production models and management methods. The deep integration of the manufacturing process of the Industrial Internet and the business management system will achieve a highly flexible configuration of production factors and mass production. As a result, it will strongly promote the transformation and upgrading of traditional manufacturing industries. So, what power does the Industrial Internet use to change the manufacturing thinking, to bring more flexibility and imagination to the manufacturing industry, and to subvert the rules of the manufacturing industry?
In recent years, there are three major technology fields in the world that are getting hotter: one is artificial intelligence, one is 5G, and the other is blockchain. All three are disruptive technologies that can change the times, change society, and change the economy. At present, China has issued four 5G licenses, and the 5G industry is on the eve of the outbreak; in terms of artificial intelligence, the industry generally believes that Industry 4.0 is a new round after the steam technology revolution, power technology revolution, computer and information technology revolution Technological revolution and industrial change, and artificial intelligence is an important driving technology for Industry 4.0; in terms of blockchain, many people even think that it will change the way data is stored and reshape the Internet and the Internet of Things. 5G, artificial intelligence and blockchain are also the "troika" of the industrial Internet.
As the next generation mobile communication network, 5G will not only bring a good mobile Internet experience to the public, but also become a technical support for various fields such as intelligent manufacturing and driverless cars. Therefore, 5G is regarded as the "infrastructure" of the industrial Internet. 5G can be combined with 3D industrial cameras, ultra-high-definition video, sensors, control systems and other technologies to help industrial enterprises realize remote operation of equipment, human-machine collaboration based on augmented reality, and real-time monitoring of production processes, which will further improve production efficiency, Improve the working conditions of employees.
As we all know, WiFi has poor stability and poor security. With the advent of the 5G era, 5G private networks (5G local area networks) tend to replace WiFi in factories on a large scale. Industrial manufacturing enterprises in some European and American countries do not need to follow the network operator's 5G construction rhythm. They can use the 5G frequency reserved by the government for enterprises to take the lead in building a 5G local area network within the enterprise to solve the stability problem. At the same time, the 5G frequency used by the enterprise is the local 5G frequency, not the authorized frequency of the network operator. It is independent of the network operator and can be independently used for 5G applications, making the private network physically isolated from the public network and providing complete data. safety.
After more than 60 years of evolution, especially driven by new theories and technologies such as mobile Internet, big data, supercomputing, sensor networks, and brain science, as well as the strong demand for economic and social development, artificial intelligence has accelerated its development, showing deep learning, New features such as cross-border integration, human-machine collaboration, open intelligence, and autonomous control. Big data-driven knowledge learning, cross-media collaborative processing, human-machine collaborative enhanced intelligence, group integrated intelligence, and autonomous intelligent systems have become the focus of artificial intelligence development. Brain-like intelligence inspired by brain science research achievements is ready to go, chip-based hardware The trend of platformization is more obvious, and the development of artificial intelligence has entered a new stage.
The core of the industrial Internet platform is based on artificial intelligence technology and integrates industrial data analysis and modeling capabilities. Big data intelligence is the key to unlock the value of industrial big data applications. Machine learning, deep learning and supervised learning are the main factors that determine the value of big data applications. Using these new-generation artificial intelligence technologies, based on digital models constructed based on industrial processes, industry knowledge, experience, and production processes, inputting industrial big data into the model can be based on the calculation of the digital models to achieve the description of the full life cycle of the manufacturing industry , Analysis, prediction, and decision-making to guide the precise execution of various tasks in the real factory.
Based on the technical characteristics of shared ledgers, smart contracts, machine consensus, and permission privacy, the blockchain is used in the industrial Internet and is expected to enhance the intelligent configuration capabilities of production factors in all links of industrial manufacturing and strengthen network coordination between the upstream and downstream of the industrial chain. For example, in the Industrial 1.0 and Industrial 2.0 eras, the management personnel manage the production of employees. In the Industrial 3.0 era, the management personnel manage the automation equipment for production scheduling. In the Industrial 4.0 era, human-machine collaboration will be realized through smart contracts based on certain rules or protocols . As another example, the unified management of industrial Internet logos is a problem. Perhaps we should change the thinking perspective of unified management-use the blockchain shared ledger mechanism to achieve unified management. What the logo needs is not analysis, but records, which are recorded on the industry blockchain.
Blockchain technology has been widely concerned in the past two years, but it has been unable to be commercialized on a large scale. The biggest bottleneck is that blockchain technology has always been used in the online digital currency and other information worlds, but large-scale commercialization must be It is necessary to solve the problem of how the offline physical world goes online. Blockchain can perfectly help the industrial Internet to connect the physical world and the virtual world, and provide the basic guarantee for "intelligence"; industry as the main body of the national economy, with the advance of the industrial Internet era, it can also enable the blockchain to achieve a large Large-scale commercial use.
The supply side, application side and government work together
In summary, at the strategic level, the Industrial Internet has been highly valued by the top three manufacturing countries in China, the United States, and Germany. At the model level, the three “CMs” of parallel manufacturing, cloud manufacturing, and consumer-centricity will be the industrial Internet. Main direction: On the technical level, 5G, artificial intelligence and blockchain troika make it possible for the industrial Internet to land quickly. Therefore, under the national strategic layout, especially the strong support of high subsidy policies in some provinces and cities, China's manufacturing enterprises, industrial software service providers, industrial equipment suppliers and Internet companies have deployed industrial Internet platforms. According to statistics, in the past two years, the number of industrial Internet platforms in China has achieved rapid development. The number of domestic industrial Internet platforms has actually appeared in three or four hundred, exceeding the total number of foreign industrial Internet platforms.
However, from a supply-side perspective, the digital model of China's industrial Internet platform has a large gap compared with foreign industrial Internet platforms. It is urgent to continuously improve the access capabilities of a large number of devices and enrich various digital models to achieve the collection of industrial big data Storage and mining analysis. How to make good use of the industrial Internet troika needs to be further upgraded and strengthened by platform companies.
From an application side perspective, enterprise users are still vigilant about the application of industrial Internet platforms, uploading data, and the security of enterprise cloud, and are still conservative and cautious about new technologies such as artificial intelligence and blockchain. How to allow many manufacturing companies to accept the industrial Internet needs to be further popularized and promoted from the three "CMs".
Therefore, from the perspective of the government, we should reorganize our thinking and focus on key application scenarios. Focusing on the macro-industry perspective, carry out policy recommendations and evaluation.
