The Industrial Internet Summit 2017 was jointly held by China Academy of Information and Communications Technology (CAICT) and the Industrial Internet Consortium in the Beijing International Convention Center from February 20 to 21, 2017. The Edge Computing Consortium (ECC) attended the summit, with edge computing's innovative concept, architecture, and industrial values catching the eyes of attendees.

 ECC booth

The theme of the summit was "Industrial Internet: Mixing and Win-Win". More than a thousand Industrial Internet leading figures from the government, enterprises, colleges, scientific research institutes, and social groups were invited to the summit to communicate and discuss core issues about the Industrial Internet, such as development trends, policies and orientation, industrial trends, technology evolution, best practices, and innovation. At the summit, the development concept of the Industrial Internet was interpreted thoroughly, and the research achievements were published, providing the participants with a deep understanding of the Industrial Internet development.

Miao Wei, the minister of Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, addressed the summit. He stated that the Industrial Internet creates opportunities for the upgrade and development of basic network capabilities such as identification and parsing, IPv6, and mobile communications. It offers a new platform for applications of new generation communications technologies such as cloud computing, Internet of things (IoT), Big Data, and artificial intelligence. It also promotes the development of industry digitalization, network design, and intelligent design. For the Industrial Internet, a golden opportunity is around the corner. Miao Wei hoped that all industry parties would focus on top issues and strengthen cooperation with each other to seize the opportunity for mutual progress and promote R&D innovation, platform development, application demonstration, and industry cultivation of the Industrial Internet. As the real economy develops, the Industrial Internet innovates, transforms, and upgrades.

The Industrial Internet is leading a wave of industry revolutions around the world. Industry digital transformation is in the making. The wave features IoT and improves operation automation with synergy between the operation technology (OT) and information and communication technology (ICT), meeting user requirements on product and service customization. The Industrial Internet promotes the transformation from products to full lifecycle services and innovation in industry services and business modes, exerting great influence on the value chain, supply chain, and industrial ecosystem.

The edge computing module is an open platform that is deployed at the network edge close to a device or data source and integrates networking, computing, storage, and application capabilities. It provides intelligent interconnection services along the shortest path to meet key requirements of industry digitalization for real-time services, data optimization, intelligent applications, security, and privacy.

 ECC Requirement and System Group Staff Chair Shi Yang was delivering Edge Computing Accelerating Industry Digital Transformation

Shi Yang, The Staff Chair of the ECC Requirement and System Group, delivered a report entitled Edge Computing Accelerating Industry Digital Transformation on the industry promotion and practice forum at the summit. He described challenges of industry digital transformation in the software-defined era and introduced the newly issued Edge Computing Reference Architecture 1.0, which covers the application, data, network, and device domains. Based on this architecture, the ECC expects to discover and solve common problems in industries and cooperate with partners to establish an open collaboration platform, creating an edge computing ecosystem. The ECC intends to help users of each industry realize digital transformation jointly with the Industrial Internet Consortium.

About the ECC

The Edge Computing Consortium (ECC) was officially established by Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd., Shenyang Institute of Automation of Chinese Academy of Sciences, CAICT, Intel Corporation, ARM, and iSoftStone in Beijing on November 30, 2016. The ECC aims to build a platform for edge computing cooperation, accelerate open collaboration of OT and ICT industries, incubate industry application best practices, and promote sound and sustainable development of edge computing.