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On January 10, 2019, the 2019 National Intelligent Industry Summit sponsored by the Chinese Society of automation, the Institute of Automation of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology of the People’s Republic of China and the China artificial intelligence Industry Development Alliance was held in Qingdao, Shandong. The summit, with the theme of “Industrial Intelligent internet: AI Empowerment, Smart Connected World”, aims to enable practitioners to better understand the nature of Industrial Intelligent Internet, explore the potential energy efficiency of Industrial Intelligent Internet, and then promote the development of intelligent industry.

Ding Xianfeng, chief intelligent networking scientist of Alibaba Cloud, attended the conference. Ding Xianfeng started from the ToB transformation of Internet BAT companies this year, and delivered a speech on the theme of “Digital Transformation of SMEs: How to Build a Parallel Factory”.

From digital knowledge information to digital physical world

What the first two decades of the Internet did was to digitize the knowledge carried by human language.For example, the process of transforming the experience accumulated in operating enterprises and enterprise R&D into digital information for dissemination is the digitalization of knowledge.

In the next two decades, the Internet of Things will digitize the entire physical world.In short, build a parallel world built with data. And then through the algorithm, and then to understand the physical world. This is contrary to the laws of people’s previous cognition of the physical world.

It turns out that people’s cognition of the physical world relies on the reasoning and judgment of scientists.Scientists summarize laws by observing the physical world and generate knowledge about the physical world. This knowledge is the source of information for people to perceive the physical world. Such as Newton’s Newton’s laws, Einstein’s quantum mechanics, relativity and so on.

In the future, after the Internet of Things digitizes the physical world, people will rely on algorithms to recognize the physical world.For example, after digitizing the factory environment, it is equivalent to building a parallel factory in the digital world. The parallel factory runs in the digital world and generates a large amount of data. When judging factory efficiency, it is not relying on managers, but relying on computer algorithms to analyze data to automatically present the results.

Ding Xianfeng pointed out that this will be the biggest wave in the next two decades.

Four angles to implement parallel factories

The work to be implemented in parallel factories can be split from four perspectives:

1. The angle of communication department, parallel factories need to produce a “language” that machines can understand each other. At the same time, if the Internet of Things wants to separate the physical world from the digital world, it also needs to build a hardware abstraction layer to support the operation of applications.

2. Computer department angle, the establishment of a parallel world requires the establishment of a “pyramid” model. Respond to changes with the same constant, and constantly simulate.

3. Control system anglethe need to build a cyber-physical system with self-situational awareness and self-regulation is its main task.

4. IoT perspective, it is necessary to realize the bridge between the terminal and the cloud, and rely on the connection protocol and pervasive computing to realize the bridge between the terminal and the cloud of data linkage. At the same time, the abstraction layer of the physical world is used to support the entire end-to-end connection, end-to-end object model management, and end-to-end security.

What will Alibaba Cloud Intelligence Network do?

Ali starts with the abstraction layer of the physical world, abstracting the physical world to the digital world, and then doing one-stop development.

For example, APP development, server development and embedded development. The main purpose is to provide infrastructure to integrate the world’s standards and knowledge into the software system, so that engineers, control engineers, and industrial engineers can easily develop IoT systems.

The Internet of Things cannot stay in the abstract layer of the physical world, but to build a digital world in the physical world to control the physical world, so an operating system of the physical world is required.

Ding Xianfeng pointed out,The core of intelligent manufacturing is to use data to drive the human-machine material law ring,To improve efficiency, it is necessary to solveProduction control, material control, resource control, quality controlAnd other issues.

Alibaba’s current job is “front shop and back factory”. Through the digitization of retail sales, the digitization of the retail supply chain, and the improvement of the digitization of factories, the efficiency of the “front shop and back factory” has been improved step by step.

The Industrial Internet of Things platform will become the operating system of intelligent manufacturing, and the first problem to be solved is the supply chain. The Industrial Internet of Things is two tasks, one is to solve product retention, and the other is to improve the human-machine material law.

Alibaba’s approach is to make the operating system of the digital factory to improve the human-machine material law.

The first thing to start is the abstraction layer of the physical world. The industrial Internet of Things is used to digitize the human-machine material law circle. After abstracting the physical world, resources are used to manage the human-machine material law circle. Finally, the MES system and operating system are used to mobilize the human-machine material law circle. , so as to improve the efficiency.

Alibaba puts the future equipment layer on the edge, the production execution layer on the edge, and turns the ISA95 model into the IoT of the ISA95 model to empower millions of small and medium-sized enterprises.

Alibaba and its partners have launched an integrated software and hardware solution. The cloud-based operating system can support the operation of ERP, MES, and IoT, and improve efficiency by optimizing the human-machine-material law. The cost of using the whole solution in the factory is about 50,000 yuan, which is conducive to the acceptance of small and medium-sized enterprises.

In the second half of 2018, Alibaba has realized the cooperation provided by 100 factory solutions. Alibaba believes that there are a large number of small and medium-sized enterprises in Jiangsu, Zhejiang and Guangdong that need to be developed in terms of informatization, networking and digitization. As long as such a standardized method is provided, these small and medium-sized enterprises can enjoy the benefits of informatization and digitization, and increase the efficiency by 10%.

Ding Xianfeng said that the era of digital transformation in the next 20 years requires two important laws: one is to surpass Moore’s Law in the digital physical world, and the other is Moore’s Law of cloud computing for data processing.– The price of computing power per cloud computing unit will drop by 50% every three years. Therefore, he predicts that by 2030, China will design and manufacture 80 to 90 percent of the world’s IoT devices and 50 percent of cloud computing.