Mobile IoT Guides Factories of the Future

Dr. Xueqin Jia of China Unicom explains how the automotive, steel and energy sectors are harnessing low power wide area connectivity

China Unicom is offering commercial Narrowband-IoT (NB-IoT) services in more than 20 cities across China, including major industrial hubs, such as Shanghai, Guangzhou, Shenzhen and Fuzhou. One of the three major mobile operators in China, Unicom says the Mobile IoT technology is supporting a shift towards advanced manufacturing in which information is used to optimise processes and supply chains in real time.

China’s mobile operators are building IoT ecosystems to support that transformation and help upgrade China’s industrial base. In a presentation at GSMA Mobile World Congress Shanghai in June, Zhang Yong, president of China Unicom’s Network Technology Research Institute, declared: “We will create a developer community to activate the innovation capabilities of industrial partners.” Unicom is encouraging developers to use the low cost wide area connectivity provided by Mobile IoT technologies to give manufacturers greater insight and more control over their operations.

Dr. Xueqin Jia, an IoT expert from China Unicom’s Network Technology Research Institute, says the IoT can help to “eliminate information asymmetry” by ensuring that real-time data flows through the value chain and even across the product life cycle, thereby helping enterprises improve production efficiency, cut costs and improve competitiveness.

In Shanghai alone, Unicom has upgraded 2,700 base stations to support NB-IoT, providing coverage across the whole city. As it refarms spectrum for 4G, the operator is using both 900MHz and 1800MHz spectrum bands for NB-IoT.

Wide coverage is crucial
Unicom is seeing particularly strong demand for IoT solutions from three industrial sectors – automotive, steel and energy. In each case, the exceptionally wide area coverage provided by NB-IoT is proving pivotal. In the automotive sector, the deployment of the IoT is happening in parallel with a shift from internal combustion to electric vehicles. “Demand for industrial IoT is growing in the new energy vehicle industry, from the production of auto parts and assembly to monitoring driving and [vehicle] diagnosis,” Xueqin Jia says. “In this industry, network coverage and security appear to be particularly important,” she adds. “Factory structure is complex with a lot of occlusion. With the maturity of low power wide area networks, such as NB-IoT and LTE-M, we can provide a good solution for the coverage of factories.” He also highlights the need for secure connectivity across the road network. “The safety of the car is related to the life of the passengers,” Xueqin Jia adds, noting the “need to protect equipment from malicious attacks, and to prevent human error and equipment failure, requires network security protection.”

At Mobile World Congress Shanghai, China Unicom and Linkor InfoTech, demonstrated how NB-IoT can be used to enable an “Industry 4.0” solution that monitors the production process of automotive parts. The solution is designed to ensure traceability, quality control and efficient production. The demo showed how real-time monitoring of machines, combined with historical data, can enable predictive maintenance and early detection of equipment failure. The collected data, such as status updates on processing, cooling and lubrication, power and speed of the main shaft, voltage, temperature and humidity, is sent to a cloud-based system for further processing, analysis, classification, anonymisation and encryption.

In the steel industry, Unicom believes the IoT could help address the twin problems of over-production and serious pollution. “Industrial IoT will help improve productivity, reduce production costs, reduce energy consumption…to assist the steel industry from traditional manufacturing to intelligent manufacturing,” says Xueqin Jia. He anticipates that new environmental regulations will prompt steel factories to relocate to remote suburbs, and Unicom will need to ensure these areas are well covered by connectivity. In this respect, the wide area coverage offered by NB-IoT will play an important role.

In China’s enormous energy sector, which includes both oil refining and coal mining, even a 1% improvement in production efficiency can have a hugely positive impact on the industry and ultimately China’s economy. In this sector, production plants are often in remote areas where conventional cellular coverage can be patchy, notes Xueqin Jia. “For example, oil factories are placed in deserts, in the ocean, and on the mountains. Compared with the traditional cellular and short distance communication technology, the coverage range of low power wide area network (NB-IoT & LTE-M) helps to solve network demand and coverage of the energy industry.”

Mobile IoT can also help energy users to become more efficient. Unicom’s customers are now using NB-IoT to collect readings from energy and water meters, track the availability of parking spaces, control street lighting and monitor sensors inside buildings. As China is prioritising the development of smart cities, the central government and city administrations, together with energy company SoftGrid, are among the early adopters of NB-IoT.

Seeking skills and standardisation
But the rollout of Mobile IoT networks won’t be sufficient to realise the full potential of the Industrial IoT in China. Xueqin Jia identifies the availability of skills and the adoption of standards as two other key factors. “At present, in the Industrial IoT industry, the ICT staff do not possess much knowledge about the industrial sector and the industry experts do not understand ICT, leading to the knowledge/talent gap,” she says. “Therefore, it is urgent to train a big group of talent with knowledge in both fields.”

A lack of standardisation is also a constraint. “Industrial processes are not standardised,” explains Dr. Jia. “There are over 100 kinds of standards such as fieldbus, industrial Ethernet, industrial wireless; whereas only 40 of these are commonly used. They cannot even be integrated with the IT domain communication standards of interoperability.” China Unicom recommends industrial enterprises adopt standardised industrial Ethernet, TSN delay sensitive network, NB-IoT, LTE-M, 5G and other industrial equipment for data transmission.

For industrial applications that require very responsive connectivity, Unicom can help customers perform simple data analytics and integration through an industrial gateway at the edge of the network. “The Industrial IoT has a high requirement for data delay (down to millisecond or even microsecond) and the traditional central cloud processing method cannot meet the demand of industrial applications,” explains Xueqin Jia. “In addition, industrial data privacy requirements are high. Industrial enterprises want the data to be stored locally/privately. To tackle real-time and security requirements of industrial IoT data, we make use of edge computing: the data is analysed, processed and stored near the edge of the user.”

In summary, China Unicom and its partners are using the IoT to bring about a fusion of the digital economy and the physical economy to ensure that China’s manufacturing sector can continue to lead the world and maintain the country’s global competitiveness. Unicom regards the Made in China 2025 strategy as pivotal to future prosperity. “The real economy is the foundation of virtual economy,” explains Xueqin Jia. “Leaving the real economy and blindly developing virtual economy will weaken the industry development and enlarge the financial bubble, and then trigger all kinds of crises, and the real economy with manufacturing as the core is the essential of realising the sustainable development of economy.”