write at the beginning
This is an era full of imagination. In this era, we can have many collisions of ideas and many wonderful sparks. Twenty years ago, the Internet should be one of the most trendy words everyone heard. In the 20 years that flooded the Internet, many great companies were born in China: Alibaba, Tencent, Baidu. . .
Today, the Internet is no longer a trendy word. There are too many trendy words today, such as: blockchain, cloud computing, AI, etc. One of these trendy words has been mentioned by everyone but has not been able to stand out from so many words. This word is- physical network. However, with the introduction of the first year of NB-IoT in 2017, the Internet of Things has become the most dazzling star of this era. Not long ago, Alibaba Cloud announced with a high profile that it will fully enter the field of Internet of Things. As a result, a new era has arrived.
How does the gas industry + the Internet of Things?
A lot of things come into being, and every successful, hot industry is no exception. In the gas industry, the first non-gas meter company to extend its vision to the field of physical network is none other than the non-gas meter company, which is represented by the leading company in the industry - Gold Card Intelligent Group Co., Ltd. As early as 2015, Jinka has keenly observed the value of the physical network in the field of gas metering, so it started to develop the IoT gas meter from the hardware, and has roughly gone through the following stages: 2G/4G wireless remote transmission meter, LORA IoT meter, NB physical netlist. It can be seen that the upgrade of the meter terminal is related to the communication method and related. With the arrival of the first year of NB-IoT in 2017, the entire gas meter industry has set off a wave of NB IoT gas meter replacement.
The hardware upgrade alone cannot meet the needs of the industry, so it is necessary to follow up the research and development of supporting software systems and software platforms. With the launch of NB-IoT, Huawei took the lead in launching its own cloud access platform OceanConnect. As a cloud data exchange platform for all terminal products using NB module communication, this platform soon penetrated into various industries. As an industry leader, Gold Card is also the first to complete the docking with Huawei's OceanConnect platform. However, due to industry characteristics, the unified cloud data interaction platform cannot meet some specific business scenarios, so each gas meter manufacturer is actively developing its own physical network cloud data interaction platform.
Here, let's start with a blogger's work experience. Since the beginning of 2015, the blogger has entered the gas meter industry. At that time, he joined the industry leader Jinka Intelligent Group Co., Ltd., which happened to be in the stage of transformation and upgrading of the company's products, which is equivalent to experiencing it firsthand. The birth process of gas meter + Internet of Things also carried out a series of explorations on the software solution of the Internet of Things gas meter as the core development of Gold Card as the software team and the system architecture. Later, due to a series of reasons, he joined Pioneer Electronic Technology Co., Ltd., another top three listed company in the industry since the beginning of 2017. As the senior architect of the R&D center, he is responsible for the construction of Pioneer IoT cloud platform and the follow-up SaaS platform. Etc. gas has been replaced by the solution design.
Well, the nonsense is here, let's get to the point. The above mentioned the solution of the Internet of Things solution on the hardware, then in the entire smart gas system, the terminal gas meter must complete data interaction with the software system in order to achieve wisdom, so the cloud data interaction platform mentioned above came into being. pregnancy.
The platform architecture is roughly as follows:
The architecture integrates a third-party cloud data interaction platform. At the same time, the gas meter terminal is connected with each business system. Each business system only needs to pay attention to its own business needs, and does not need to care about the different communication protocols caused by the different types of meter terminals. The conversion of data upstream and downstream is completed by the cloud platform, and the cloud platform also supports the access of third-party gas meters.
At this stage, it seems that a complete set of IoT gas meter solutions has been formed. However, if you think about it carefully, if the Internet of Things just connects the terminal to the network, it will be too childish, so how to generate more advanced applications?
Don't worry, just listen to my detailed analysis. Take the NB IoT gas meter as an example, because it is powered by a lithium battery, it is determined that this type of terminal must have low power consumption, which means that this type of terminal cannot communicate with the cloud platform frequently, but even so, every day Guaranteed at least two communication frequencies will also generate massive amounts of data. At present, the platform design terminal access volume is 2000W+, of course, this is a gradual access process, and the initial volume will not be so large. Even if it is calculated based on millions of terminal access, the platform generates millions of pieces of data reported by terminals every day, which is quite a huge amount of data. Therefore, under the above architecture system, we need to design another big data center to collect massive data reported by terminals and business-related data generated by these massive terminals in the business system, such as recharge information for gas meters, gas meters Corresponding account opening user information, etc. After collecting and cleaning these data, they are aggregated to the big data center, and the big data center uses the technology related to big data to analyze and count the data, and form valuable reports, early warning information, forecast information, etc.
The general structure is as follows:
For the data storage layer, MongoDB was initially considered as the storage unit, and later, hdfs was considered and combined with big data frameworks such as spark and hadoop to realize data analysis, statistics and other functions.
Has a complete solution been formed at this stage? I don’t think so yet. After we completed the design of the first stage, we can understand that we have built the skeleton of the Internet of Things + gas industry; and after the implementation of the second stage, it is equivalent to perfecting the nervous system, which can real-time connect the various peripherals. The status is collected in real time. What about after the data is collected and displayed? We need a smart brain to conduct comprehensive analysis and judgment based on the collected data, so as to issue different instructions to automatically command and operate each terminal. At this time, it is necessary to introduce machine learning and artificial intelligence.
For example, by connecting the big data platform to the city brain of Hangzhou, the intelligence of the entire city gas industry can be realized. Through the city brain, the operation of each gas meter can be monitored in real time, and the gas leakage phenomenon can be analyzed. When a dangerous situation occurs, the relevant units are automatically notified to deal with the dangerous situation and so on.
write at the end
The era of the Internet of Things has come, and all walks of life can use their imagination to actively embrace the Internet of Things. The future world must be disruptive, the future world can be virtualized, and the virtualized world must be based on the Internet of Everything.