Seize the opportunities of China in the era of the Internet of everything

The Internet of Everything profoundly changes the world

At present, it is the turning point towards the industrial Internet. Everything is connected through the Internet and sensors. The development of hardware is showing three major trends: miniaturization, mobility and consumerism. All kinds of sensing devices can not only be made small and cheap, but also can be carried around. These tiny devices can be equipped on various objects all over the world, including machines, electrical appliances, human bodies, animals, plants, etc. They collect the state data of these targets and exchange data with other objects through wireless networks. Create a world where everything is connected and computing is everywhere.

Among them, machine connection will be the primary goal of sensors. At the beginning of the era of large-scale machine production, the efficiency of machines is constantly improving, but after reaching a critical point, the efficiency of machines is difficult to optimize, and it also enters a stagnation state. When machines are connected to form a system, the efficiency of a machine may become the bottleneck of the system. The failure of a machine may lead to the paralysis of the whole system. The complexity of the system makes engineers often lose sight of one thing and lose sight of the other, and the efficiency of the system is even more difficult to improve. However, if we can monitor the running state of the machine through sensors, confirm the good degree of various equipment through calculation, calculate the time to optimize and update the equipment, we can control the uncertainty in the production process and reduce the loss caused by accidents.

General Electric, the world's largest industrial manufacturer, sums up this increase in operational efficiency as a "1% phenomenon." The company estimates that a 1% improvement in aircraft engine maintenance worldwide could save the world $250 million a year; a 1% improvement in power generation in the energy industry could contribute $4 billion to the global economy; and a 1% improvement in efficiency in the medical industry could save the global medical industry $63 billion. By analogy, machines around the world can generate significant revenue by improving their efficiency by just 1%.

At present, there are about 3 million important, huge, day and night running machines in the world. These machines all work under certain conditions of temperature, humidity, pressure, vibration and rotation. These parameters are important monitoring indicators. In addition, there are tens of billions of microprocessor-equipped appliances around the world, which can be equipped with sensors in the future. These machines run and work day and night. It is conceivable that we will usher in the era of super data explosion.

The Industrial Internet is not out of reach. GE has plans to install sensors on tens of thousands of its products, from aircraft to laser scalpels, to transmit real-time data on the status of equipment to platforms over the network to monitor and optimize the operation of these targets. In July 2012, GM invested US $170 million to open a battery factory in Schenectady, New York. 10000 sensors were installed in the 16000 square meters factory building. These sensors were distributed on various production lines to monitor and record the temperature, air pressure, humidity, production ingredients, energy consumption and other conditions during the production process. The factory management personnel obtained these data through the iPad they carried with them, so as to find problems in the first place. Supervise and adjust production.

Monitoring production processes through sensors is only part of the Industrial Internet project, GE's goals are: "Let each product generate memory"-In the future, sensors will be implanted into the product before it leaves the factory to record its production process. After the product arrives at the customer and starts to enter the service link, the sensors will record the operation of the product at all times. Once problems and failures occur, GM can quickly integrate the production records, sales records and product operation records, and then determine the reasons through analysis. The results of these analyses are fed back into production to reduce errors.

In addition to the industrial Internet, there is also the home Internet. All kinds of household items, such as appliances, doors and windows, the next step is to connect to the Internet, we are about to enter an era of smart home: you can adjust the temperature of the refrigerator at home in the office; you can control the switch of the rice cooker on the way to work, and close the window and turn on the air conditioner. There is even the human Internet, and more and more wearable devices can monitor our body temperature, heartbeat, sleep patterns, calorie consumption and other indicators, and upload the data to the cloud for real-time analysis by doctors or health care personnel.

The agricultural Internet is also coming out. Thanks to connectivity and big data technologies, farming in the future will be more efficient and productive. For example, sensors can be buried in the soil to measure soil moisture in real time, and then combined with the local temperature at that time to determine when to water crops and how much water to irrigate, to achieve agricultural irrigation automation. For example, drones, once military technology, are also rapidly entering the civilian field. Through regular patrols of drones, the whole farm can be photographed. In the past, an aircraft was invited to photograph at a cost of 1000 dollars an hour, but now a drone costs only a few hundred dollars. Buy it can be taken every day, even every hour, and then use software to analyze these photos, you can find problems that are difficult for the human eye to find, such as whether irrigation is uniform, soil color changes, pest disaster identification and prevention, according to the results of these analyses can be adjusted at any time planting measures, crop harvest can be improved. These changes can be summarized as big data-driven precision agriculture.