How to Seize China's Opportunities in the Era of the Internet of Everything
The Internet of Everything Profoundly Changes the World
Right now, we are at a turning point toward the Industrial Internet; the Internet of Everything is realized through the internet and sensors, and the development of hardware is showing three major trends: miniaturization, mobility and consumerization. Various sensing devices can not only be made very small and very cheap, but can also be carried around. These tiny devices can be equipped on all kinds of objects around the world, including machines, appliances, human bodies, animals, plants and so on. They collect status data from these targets, and then exchange data with other objects through wireless networks, forming a world of “everything connected, computing everywhere.”
Among these, machine-to-machine connection will be the primary target of sensors. When humanity first entered the era of large-scale machine production, machine efficiency kept improving, but after reaching a critical point, machine efficiency became very difficult to optimize further and also entered a state of stagnation. When machines are connected to machines and form a system, the efficiency of one machine may become the bottleneck of the system, and a fault in one machine may cause the entire system to break down. The complexity of the system often leaves engineers unable to attend to everything at once, making it even harder to improve system efficiency. But if sensors can be used to monitor the operating status of machines, and calculations can confirm how well various types of equipment are functioning, and the timing can be accurately determined for equipment optimization and maintenance updates, then uncertainty in the production process can be controlled and losses caused by unexpected situations can be reduced.
⟦NL> General Electric, the world's largest industrial manufacturer, summarized this improvement in operational efficiency as the “1% phenomenon.” After estimation, the company pointed out that if the maintenance efficiency of aircraft engines worldwide increased by 1%, the world could save 250 million USD each year; if the power generation equipment in the energy industry improved efficiency by 1%, it could contribute 4 billion USD to the global economy; and if efficiency in the healthcare industry increased by 1%, it could help the global healthcare industry save 63 billion USD. By analogy, as long as machines worldwide improve efficiency by 1%, they can bring very considerable revenue.
At present, there are roughly 3 million important, huge machines running day and night around the world. These machines all operate under certain conditions of temperature, humidity, pressure, vibration and rotation, and these parameters are all important monitoring indicators. In addition, there are also tens of billions of electrical appliances with microprocessors around the world, all of which can be equipped with sensors in the future. These machines run and work day and night without stopping. It is imaginable that we will welcome an era of a super data explosion.
The Industrial Internet is not out of reach. General Electric has already planned to install sensors on tens of thousands of its products, from large aircraft to small laser scalpels, and transmit equipment operating status data in real time to a platform through the network in order to monitor and optimize the operation of these targets. In July 2012, General Electric invested 170 million USD to open a battery factory in Schenectady, New York. In a 16,000 sq m factory building, 10,000 sensors were installed. These sensors are distributed across each production line, monitoring and recording conditions in the production process such as temperature, air pressure, humidity, production ingredients and energy consumption. Factory managers use iPads they carry with them to obtain this data, so that they can discover problems immediately and supervise and adjust production.
Monitoring the production process through sensors is still only part of the Industrial Internet plan. General Electric's goal is: “let every product have a memory”——in the future, products will have sensors implanted before leaving the factory, recording their production process. After the product reaches the customer and begins to enter the service phase, the sensors will record the product's operating condition at every moment. Once problems and faults occur, General Electric can quickly integrate three kinds of data: production records, sales records and product operation records, and then determine the cause through analysis. These analysis results will in turn be fed back to the production phase to reduce errors.
Besides the Industrial Internet, there is also the Home Internet. Various household items, such as appliances, doors and windows, will next be connected to the internet. We are about to step into an era of smart homes: in your office, you can adjust the temperature of the refrigerator at home; on your way home from work, you can control the switch of the rice cooker, close the windows and turn on the air conditioner. There is even the Human Body Internet. More and more wearable devices can monitor indicators such as our body temperature, heartbeat, sleep patterns and calorie consumption, and also upload the data to the cloud for real-time analysis and use by doctors or health care personnel.
The Agricultural Internet is also emerging. Thanks to interconnection and big data technologies, future agricultural cultivation will be more efficient and higher-yielding. For example, sensors can be buried in the soil to measure soil moisture in real time, and then combined with the temperature at that time and place to decide when crops should be watered and how much water should be used, realizing automated agricultural irrigation. Another example is that unmanned aerial vehicles, once a military technology, are also rapidly entering civilian fields. Through regular patrols by drones, the condition of the entire farm can be photographed. In the past, hiring a plane to take photos cost 1,000 USD per hour, but now a drone costs only a few hundred USD. If you buy one, you can take photos every day, even every hour, and then use software to analyze these photos to discover problems that are difficult for the human eye to find, such as whether irrigation is uniform, changes in soil color, and the identification and prevention of pest disasters. Based on the results of these analyses, planting measures can be adjusted at any time, and crop harvests can be improved. These changes can be summarized as big-data-driven precision agriculture.