Industrial Internet of Things: West and China

We know of the Internet of Things (IoT) – it refers to interconnected devices that “talk” to each other. Like the wearable fitness sensors that report back to your smartphone. A decade or so back, there was also talk of the industrial variant of it, the so called Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), writes Nicholas Welch:

“The belief was that the falling cost of cloud computing, sensor costs, and machine learning — coupled with new connectivity technologies such as 5G or IPv6 — would lead to a revolution.”

Revolution in what? In manufacturing efficiency, in predicting when an equipment would have problems (say your washing machine or a wind turbine) and then proactively sending the service guy to fix it, in reducing system downtime and thus productivity increases. Add data analytics on top of that, and we should have had massive productivity increases. So why didn’t that happen?

 

Simply put, there are too many different players whose systems needed to be integrated. (1) The companies providing the sensors; (2) the different (and often incompatible) software that ran on each of them; (3) in-plant setup of a reliable, high speed connectivity network; (4) addressing cybersecurity concerns in data exchange among all these entities; (5) cloud computing company in the background.

 

Stitching all of this together was very hard, plus there was no clear answer as to how much saving could one expect? Would it justify the expenditure? Further, historical records were in paper format; and that reduced the amount of data that could be crunched for patterns and improved efficiencies by algorithms.

 

That then is why the IIoT never happened. At least not in the West.

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But China? That’s a different story. Today, for example, China has legions of “dark factories” – it refers to factories that are entirely automated. With no humans, the factory doesn’t need lights, ergo the term dark factories.

 

Surely the challenges listed above would apply to China as well? What did China do differently then?

 

First, China’s government understood the technical aspect of the problem, the biggest one being “asset mapping”. This refers to the ability to identify, say, the robot, then the part of the robot having the issue, which in turn tracking which sensor is attached to that part of the robot. A common taxonomy is needed for this to work as intended because “dozens of physical and digital systems” are involved in the equation and that is what the Chinese government pushed for – standardization.

 

Second, China accepted that the free market (aka capitalism) would probably not solve this problem because there were too many different players. That created interoperability issues; it also meant that no one player would dominate and gain efficiencies of scale. Under these conditions, IIoT would never take off. So China’s government decided to limit the number to 10 cross-industry, cross-domain platforms. As always, such ideas were first tried at city and state level, not the entire country.

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Can the West not copy China’s model on this matter? In theory, yes. In practice, philosophical and structural difficulties arise. The West worships free market capitalism; letting the state guide (some) things would not come naturally. The state would need to learn technical issues and the available technology options, a skillset missing in Western policy making bodies. Then there’s the timeframe issue – any such attempts often provide long-term benefits, but Western countries are democratic, and their politicians need results in the short-term. And last not but not least, the West still cannot accept the idea that others (non-West) can come up with systems and solutions. (See how they still don’t copy India’s Aadhar and UPI?)