On December 31, 22, Zou Zhilei was appointed as the chairman of Huawei Coal Mine Group. At that time, the organization of Huawei Coal Mine Corps had not yet taken shape. In Zou Zhilei's words, "there were monks before temples".
In Huawei's 34-year history, the Coal Mine Corps has appeared for the first time. Who is Zou Zhilei and why did Ren Zhengfei entrust him with the management of the Coal Mine Corps?
Zou zhilei joined Huawei in 1998, and has been engaged in domestic and international market sales all the year round. He once served as the president of global sales and service department of Huawei enterprise BG, and successively served as the representative of Huawei Guangzhou representative office and the president of North Africa region. He is also known to the outside world as the president of Huawei operator BG, and is a typical "veteran" Huawei.
The carrier business is the foundation of Huawei. Although the consumer business once surpassed the carrier business in recent years, in the eyes of most Huawei people, the carrier business is Huawei's ballast stone.
Ding Yun, the current president of BG, is also the predecessor and successor of Zou Zhilei, who served as the president of products and solutions for a period of time. If Ding Yun is mainly responsible for guarding the rear area, Zou Zhilei's role is more similar to the vanguard of land reclamation.
Of course, Huawei Coal Mine Corps itself is based on Huawei's major businesses. Ren Zhengfei's operational attitude of personally supervising the war, gathering cross-organizational capabilities, and fighting the country instead of defending the country has made the development of the coal mine corps exceed expectations.
On September 14th, the National Energy Group and Huawei jointly held a conference on "Mine Hong Operating System". The participants included the Bureau of Mine Supervision, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, the Ministry of Science and Technology, the Energy Bureau, the Coal Industry Association, the National Energy Group and Huawei, and the lineup was luxurious. At the meeting, "Kuanghong Operating System" was officially released, which is the best practice of the current coal mine corps landing, and also a big step for Huawei HarmonyOS operating system from To C to to to B.
how did "kuanghong operating system" come into being, what kind of logic does it reflect, and what trends does it represent for Huawei?
on February 19th, 221, Ren Zhengfei, the founder of Huawei, was interviewed by Chinese and foreign media after the unveiling ceremony of "Intelligent Mine Innovation Laboratory" in Shanxi. It was in this interview that Ren Zhengfei announced the establishment of Huawei Coal Mine Corps and officially entered the coal mining industry. In the previous months, he had visited coal mines in Shanxi and steel mills in Hunan.
"At that time, President Ren proposed that we should make the coal industry safe and efficient, solve the problem of efficient and safe production of coal, and let coal workers go to work in suits and ties, which became the vision of our coal corps." Zou Zhilei said.
Ren Zhengfei gave an examination question, and Zou Zhilei and his coal mine corps were responsible for solving it.
"I was very, very miserable at that time." Looking back from the present, Zou Zhilei invited Wang Guofa, an academician of China Academy of Engineering, to discuss the big data governance in smart mines for a whole afternoon. In 212, the laboratory also invited Ge Shirong, president of China University of Mining and Technology (Beijing), to give a lecture at Huawei.
"I wasn't in the company on the day of President Ge's lecture, so President Ren specially sent me the meeting contents of President Ge's lecture, and asked me to forward them to all employees of the coal mining group for study. Everyone in our coal mining corps had to learn the courses of coal mining, and everyone passed the exam, which led to our later coal night school."
Zou Zhilei, Chairman of Huawei Coal Mine Corps
In addition, Zou Zhilei also led a team to study in major mines. Shanxi, Shaanxi and Inner Mongolia made a big trip, and went to mines for more than a dozen times. After two or three months of discussion, Huawei's concept of intelligent mines was gradually formed.
"The essence of smart mines is a change in the whole industrial architecture system. Only by establishing a unified industrial internet platform can this problem be solved. The essence of smart mines is industrial internet", Zou Zhilei pointed out.
One of the biggest problems faced by intelligent mines is the inconsistency of data and standards. A "domestic" shearer needs to use three kinds of operating systems, including Windows/Linux/Vxworks, involving three kinds of general protocols and 161 kinds of internal chips. The key chips are highly dependent on imports.
every coal mine is built by different manufacturers, and the standards of coal mines are different. There are different opinions on the concept of intelligent mines, and the complex geological environment has not yet reached a unified understanding in the coal mine industry. At present, some smart mines have various protocols, and the data islands and even the mine informatization are seriously duplicated. "I have heard that at most one mine is duplicated, and I have been talking about smart mines for the fourth time this year."
to realize industrial internet in coal mines, it is necessary to deal with it according to the architecture of industrial internet, which is also the starting point of Huawei's smart mine solution.
first of all, data collection. The data in the physical world is mapped through the network layer, forming a digital twin in the virtual world. The biggest difficulty in this step is the inconsistency between data and network formats.
thousands of kinds of equipment in the mine must achieve a unified data format, and the formats of data sources such as cameras, monitoring stations, coal cutters, hydraulic supports, belt conveyors and harvesters are naturally inconsistent, so the mine system has become a unified operating system and unified data standards.
Above the data collection is the industrial bearer network, and the 5G network is at this layer to solve the problem of low latency, including F5G (fifth generation fixed network) and new generation IP network.
Huawei's intelligent mine architecture
is followed by cloud infrastructure and digital platform, which supports platform-level capabilities such as application enablement, integration enablement (ROMA), AI enablement (ModelArts), data enablement (DAYU) and development enablement (DevOps) to complete the development and digitization process of coal mine applications.
The top layer is a visualization center for managers, and the results of data collection, processing and calculation are returned to the actual application scene, which can be clearly displayed.
Shendong Coal is China's first coal production base of 2 million tons. Li Xinhua, chairman of Guoneng Shendong Coal Group, said that Shendong has more than 1,37 major equipment suppliers, 134, sets of various equipment, more than 1 operating systems and more than 5 communication protocols that need to be properly connected.
different equipment devices have different operating systems, and the operating systems and applications provided by the same supplier in different periods are also incompatible with each other, which makes it difficult to share data, exchange information and intelligently link production operations. Especially in the aspects of coal mining and transportation, coal mining and ventilation, and industrial control system coordination, the interfaces and protocols of coal cutters, supports and scraper conveyors from different manufacturers are incompatible with each other.
To build an intelligent mine, Shendong Coal has pointed out five key issues: solving the technical blockade and chip sticking; Solve the problem of real-time transmission in industrial network; Solve the problem of the interconnection of all things in production factors; Solve the problem of communication protocol standardization; Solve the problem of backward data governance means.
In May, 221, Shendong Coal and Huawei Coal Mine Corps set up a joint innovation project group of Smart Coal Mine, and identified 18 joint innovation projects and 21 sub-projects. In August, the signing of the strategic cooperation agreement and the unveiling ceremony of the joint innovation center were held. Up to now, Shendong has invested 86 business backbones in various departments, more than 7 Huawei residents in Shendong Innovation Center, more than 2 research and development personnel in Huawei headquarters, and more than 16 cooperative manufacturers to jointly tackle technical problems.
at present, kuanghong operating system has successfully adapted to 398 application units of 2 kinds of equipment, such as hydraulic support master controller, working face communication controller, combined switch display controller, hanging rail inspection robot and rubber-tyred inspection robot. The main work plan of the two companies in the next step is to do a good job in the field test, application and promotion of HarmonyOS system under the general framework system of National Energy Group.
But what exactly is the Kuanghong system, what is its relationship with HarmonyOS, and how does it solve the unity problem?
on August 9, 22, Huawei officially released the HarmonyOS system. At the end of August, Huawei negotiated with China Open Atoms Open Source Foundation to donate the basic pedestal and core framework of the HarmonyOS system to the Open Source Foundation. The Open Source Foundation established the Harmony Project in September 22. OpenHarmony actually refers to the name of the project donated by Huawei to the Open Source Foundation.
OpenHarmony itself is an open source version of all the basic bases in HarmonyOS. In a logical way, Huawei can be regarded as the first company to release products based on the open source version of OpenHarmony. In June this year, Huawei released HarmonyOS OS 2. for smart phones, which is the first release for 2C based on OpenHarmony. At present, the number of users has exceeded 1 million.
the mining system is actually based on OpenHarmony, an operating system in the mining field promoted by Shendong Group. The system is downward, which can realize access, control and management of various software and hardware resources; The system is upward, which can provide support such as development interface and tool resources, and provide diversified services in the form of industrial APP.
As for HarmonyOS's application from an operating system in 2C domain to 2B domain, it is actually very challenging. Although the demand of the Internet of Everything was considered at the beginning of HarmonyOS's design, no one wants to be the first to eat crabs. HarmonyOS's prospects in the industrial field need to be verified.
live demonstration of real-time operation of coal mine equipment by Kuanghong system
As mentioned above, Huawei has long realized that the essence of smart mines is industrial internet, and everything should be connected, but how to do it? Zou Zhilei visited almost all people who do industrial internet in Huawei. Everyone has their own opinions. Many of Huawei's pilots have been successful and failed.
In April this year, Zou Zhilei visited China Shenhua Energy Group. What Shenhua Energy wanted to do most was to copy many successful experiences of Shendong Coal to other coal mines. At the beginning of May, after investigating Shendong Coal, he obviously felt the information island problem of coal mines.
"Is there an operating system that can solve it?" Zou Zhilei's colleague pushed HarmonyOS hard, and Shendong's attitude was unexpected. From the beginning of concept discussion to the final landing, the speed of decision was faster than Huawei's imagination.
Coal Mine Corps investigated sensors and other equipment in more than a dozen mines, and later reported to Zou Zhilei: "It's not a big problem", because HarmonyOS was born for the Internet of Everything. It is not a traditional mobile Internet, unlike Android. It can not only solve the problem of mobile Internet, ranging from 128k to several G or even hundreds G, and can deploy HarmonyOS to meet the equipment scene of the Internet of Everything.
If HarmonyOS is adopted, all sensors under the mine will be replaced, and the high cost will deter all customers, and Huawei's ambition in smart mines will not be displayed at all. Later, the Coal Mine Corps communicated with the HarmonyOS team and found that many equipment problems can be solved, and the cost problem will be solved.
Wang Chenglu, President of Huawei Huawei's AI and Smart Full Scene Business Department
Wang Chenglu, President of Huawei's AI and Smart Full Scene Business Department, the "father of HarmonyOS", said that the mine-hong system is based on the ability of OpenHarmony soft bus, forming a connection without human intervention, and the realization of heterogeneous networking is particularly critical, effectively solving the heterogeneous problem between various devices. Now, the mine-hong system has realized the heterogeneous networking problem between Bluetooth and WiFi.
the biggest problem of soft bus wireless communication is that it is very afraid of signal interference. once there is interference, there will be error code. once there is error code, all the real-time and stability will disappear. Huawei has reduced the degree of interference to a minimum through signal interference removal, and its resistance and tolerance to packet loss and jitter have reached 3%, that is, 3% packet loss will not affect the upper-level business.
It is worth mentioning that Huawei's accumulated experience in the field of communication is all used in the mining field, and various wireless access modes are aggregated. When all channels are good, the channel capabilities can be aggregated, and when some channels have poor signals, they can make mutual backups.
Facing the long-standing problem of different devices and different protocols, the distributed soft bus is still the basis of the protocol. The sub-package library and object library of equipment are set up below, and various instrument operation actions and interactions between devices are modeled and data structures are constructed, which ensures the interoperability of devices with a unified model and data structure.
"Today is a very memorable day. For HarmonyOS's ecology, we have taken a key step from 2C to 2B. For the whole industrial field, we have taken a very important step today, and the industrial Internet has really landed. Today will open the door to the future capacity of the entire HarmonyOS system, including the expansion of HarmonyOS's ecology in various fields." Wang Chenglu said with emotion.
In his speech, Zou Zhilei threw out a point worth thinking about-what happened in the mobile Internet in the past decade will also happen in the industrial Internet. If this argument is confirmed, it is not difficult to understand why Huawei went deep into the coal mine field and even made such a big fight.
in 183, during the famous western development in the United States, a large number of gold diggers flocked to the market, but among the gold diggers, a group of people did not seek gold, only sold water and tools, and earned a lot of money.
is Huawei also like a "water seller" in the new era?
Coal Mine Corps is just a microcosm of Huawei's expansion of the commercial track. In the mining field, Huawei only makes a thin layer, positioning itself to empower the industry, never controlling data, and never realizing it by data, and insisting on the strategy of integration and enabling, in order to gain the trust of customers.
Huawei is not interested in mining. The birth of the Coal Mine Corps carries Huawei's goal of accelerating the commercialization of technology and finding new income space.
considering the background of U.S. sanctions against Huawei, although Huawei has done a good job of "living with quality", its revenue and profit performance have shown some fatigue, and it has to shrink back in some businesses, such as mobile phone business, x86 servers, switches and other businesses that cannot be completely separated from overseas chips.
In an email recently released by Huawei's president, Ren Zhengfei bluntly said that from a realistic business point of view, Huawei should focus on the industrial application of 5G+AI, and form legions such as ports, airports, inverters, data center energy, coal mines, etc. to prepare for the charge.
In addition to operator BG, enterprise BG and consumer BG, Huawei urgently needs new revenue sources. According to the past industrial situation, it often takes several years for new technologies to mature, and it will take some time for new technologies to be adopted on a large scale by the industry. Huawei can wait before being sanctioned by the United States, but now, what Huawei lacks most is time.
On the one hand, technologies such as 5G and cloud computing have not yet reached the harvest period. For example, the large-scale mature application has not broken out, and the enterprise market needs to be continuously spread and accumulated, which doomed the revenue of 5G.