Mankind is entering the era of “connection of all things”
Recently, the Ministry of industry and information technology released the key industries and application scenarios of “5G + industrial Internet”, marking that China’s 5G application has shifted from exploration to promotion. 5G has three characteristics: high speed, low delay and wide connection, which will promote the consumer Internet forward to the industrial Internet, and finally build an intelligent world of “everything connected”.
The essence of industrial Internet is to use information technology to closely connect the equipment, production lines, factories, suppliers, products and customers in the industrial manufacturing industry, which is across the equipment, system, and region, so as to improve efficiency and promote the intellectualization of the whole manufacturing service system. The 5G application scenarios released recently, such as collaborative operation and flexible manufacturing, indicating the importance of industrial Internet to achieve broader and deeper social cooperation. It is through this large-scale cooperation that human civilization makes progress continuously.
Large-scale social cooperation could be divided into two patterns: the first is centralized, with hierarchical “command-feedback” chain and mutual principal-agent relationship as the core characteristics. The typical representatives are government, bureaucratic organizations and military units; the second type is decentralized, represented by market mechanism. There is no central planning or unified coordination. The participants of the mechanism, based on cost-benefit calculation, promote the overall interests through automatic division of labor and exchange. On the social level, the efficiency of decentralized market mechanism is higher than that of centralized command mechanism. In the future mass machine equipment connection (mMTC) network, a decentralized and value exchange based large-scale collaboration among machines can be realized by introducing market mechanism. Therefore, the industrial Internet in the digital era is not only the Internet of factory manufacturing, but also a distributed network and governance structure. All enterprises can safely join this network to realize manufacturing services, integrated innovation and value sharing.
Sharing mechanism in large scale machine cooperation
Although large-scale collaboration between machines has great value potentially, it still faces problems such as privacy protection, trust between agents and higher demand of computing power of large-scale collaboration.
Therefore, the solution design of the industry is to adopt the pattern of “machine network + blockchain”. The role of Cloud in traditional industrial Internet, such as using the smart contract based on the blockchain to realize the value measurement, distribution and settlement of large-scale cooperation. Finally, it would make the large-scale cooperation of cross-border and public affairs more credible and efficient.
1) Effective data confirmation
The reason why blockchain has become the key to the future industrial Internet is that it integrates technologies such as cryptography, peer-to-peer network, consensus mechanism, and forms a new way of data recording, transmission, storage and presentation, so as to construct a decentralized pattern, which can effectively confirm the data rights. In the industrial Internet, the integration of blockchain technology can solve the problem of mutual trust and cooperation among multiple players, as well as the problem of industrial enterprises’ control over their own data.
2) Reducing the transaction cost of multilateral platform
With the development of global market and the subdivision of supply chain, the participation cost of complex business activities is no longer “bilateral”, but “multilateral”, and the establishment of trust relationship is more and more expensive. Blockchain technology can build a peer-to-peer and unified platform for business activities. At the same time, it can significantly reduce one of the trust costs in transaction costs to be commercially feasible. Participants in business activities will move from traditional “bilateral platform” to “multilateral platform”. While scale effect is formed, the trust cost will not increase too much.Finally, it will be superimposed into an ecological effect, forming a viable business model.
3) To solve the problem of Isolated Data Island by privacy computing
Although blockchain can play a significant role in solving trust, cooperation and other problems in industrial Internet, it still has some defects in data value mining and privacy protection. Therefore, blockchain also needs to combine with privacy computing. Privacy computing can not only realize data sharing under privacy protection, ensure the authorization of privavy data, but also prevent malicious eavesdroppers or others from accessing the original data or data calculation results. In the industrial Internet, the core data is still kept in the enterprise. Under the premise of meeting the needs of data privacy security, privacy computing enables enterprises to use massive industrial data more efficiently and accurately, solving the problem of Isolated Data Island. Furtherly, it enhance the value of data in the process of sovereign ownership and rights sharing, and realize the two-way empowerment of various enterprises.
PlatON helps intelligent interconnection of Machine Networks
PlatON is a privacy computing network based on cryptography algorithm. As a global leader in blockchain industry, it can effectively solve the problems about Big Data managemen in the industrial Internet by its existing technical advantages, and provide a safer infrastructure based on privacy protection and edge computing capability. Firstly, PlatOn’s powerful encryption algorithm technology can provide trusted device authentication, multi-channel data transmission and data storage services for industrial Internet, and enhance the security of device system; Secondly, PlatOn’s new computing architecture can make full use of the computing resources of adjacent nodes, provide strong computing support for the industrial Internet, and comprehensively improve the timeliness of services. Finally, PlatOn’s privacy protection and multi-party secure computing (MPC) technology can support collaborative analysis of massive data and integration of diverse scenarios
On April 30, 2021, the PlatON privacy AI computing network obtained the community license with 80.6% support rate, and the current pre-deployment network has officially become the main network. PlatON will gradually establish a multi-agent collaboration and computing network for the future, and promote industrial civilization and human society from “interconnection of all things” to “intelligent connection of all things”.
Disclaimer: The views, suggestions, and opinions expressed here are the sole responsibility of the experts. No journalist was involved in the writing and production of this article.