The outbreak of COVID-19 occurred between the New Year’s Day and the Spring Festival, when a large number of traditional labor-intensive enterprises have been closed. The closure of roads, cities and even provinces has also led to remote workers being unable to return to work, the logistics of raw materials and finished products has been seriously affected, and the recovery of medical protective equipment production capacity is far from keeping up with the development of the epidemic. Coupled with other factors, a number of hospitals in Hubei ran out of supplies and had to openly ask for help from the society, and the situation was extremely urgent.

810-068158-013 Is there a way to solve this dilemma by mobilizing the capacity of factories and transportation companies in a short period of time without the presence of humans to effectively support the emergency activities of the health and epidemic prevention and medical sectors? The answer may be the industrial Internet.

Ideas arising from public health emergencies

The medical community already has a mature prediction model for the development of infectious diseases, and academic leaders like Zhong Nanshan can even quickly judge the development of the situation based on personal experience. This provides the basic condition for the model of prospective response.

Public health emergency is a special kind of emergency activities. While emergency responses to geological and climatic disasters can mobilize significant human input, public health emergencies must do the opposite, minimizing the movement of people and tightly controlling the concentration of human resources.

810-068158-013 However, the practice of fighting the epidemic has deeply revealed the great contradiction between the traditional manufacturing model and the plague control measures: the existing major industrial sectors, especially manufacturing and transportation, are dependent on a large number of human inputs to operate and sustain. Restricting the movement and gathering of people means that economic activity cannot take place at all. Even the manufacturing of medical devices, which underpins the emergency activities themselves, has been considerably constrained. Quite a number of mask and protective equipment manufacturing enterprises rely on spiritual encouragement and high overtime pay, organize workers to risk their lives to return to the workshop to work overtime, and the vast majority of workers also come up with a high degree of ideological consciousness to undertake this task. But even so, the pace of capacity recovery has not kept pace with demand growth. It is expected to take until the end of February or even March for the production capacity of medical protective masks to catch up with demand. This is not a long-term solution, nor is it a sustainable emergency response model.

The spread of the epidemic and the process of fighting the epidemic also proved that grassroots health and epidemic prevention and medical departments are not always able to accurately predict the development of the situation, and it is even more difficult to predict the explosive demand for medical treatment and epidemic prevention. Government and production companies rely on human-driven management processes, and there is a delay in responding to explosive demand. It must be pointed out that China’s nationwide system and the feelings of the family and the country have brought the response ability of human-driven management to the extreme. Even so, it was difficult to meet front-line needs in the early stages of the epidemic. A revolutionary approach must therefore be sought.

So, can an industrial Internet similar to the aerospace cloud network achieve unmanned production by transforming traditional mask factories? We believe that this can be done.

810-068158-013 The concept of the industrial Internet is to promote the transformation of production methods through collaborative design, collaborative manufacturing, and collaborative production. The use of collaboration on the cloud can quickly bridge many “cracks” in the traditional production and collaboration mode, compress the information flow process to the extreme, so that incorrect and non-compliant information can not enter the flow process, and greatly improve efficiency and effectiveness. For emergency production, there are natural advantages.

In this paper, we simply imagine such a public health emergency response material supply system: its information flow starts from the needs of health and epidemic prevention departments, based on big data and expert systems, to make timely quantitative analysis or even prospective quantitative analysis of public health emergency needs; Then, the processed quantitative analysis results are decomposed into the demand information for raw materials, transportation capacity, electricity, necessary manpower and other aspects, and flow to relevant enterprises, governments and other institutions, triggering the response of raw materials, transportation, policy support and other aspects; With the support of the government and the transportation industry, raw materials and ancillary information flow to all levels of processes in turn, and finally form qualified products and ancillary information; Through the logistics process, the products and ancillary information are directly delivered to the end user – that is, the hands of hospitals and health and epidemic prevention enforcement units.

Perhaps the most valuable of these is the forward-looking response to explosive demand and the breakdown of quantitative analysis results. In fact, the medical community already has a mature prediction model for the development of infectious diseases, and academic leaders like Zhong Nanshan can quickly judge the development of the situation, even by relying on personal experience. This provides the basic condition for the model of prospective response. As for the decomposition of the quantitative analysis results, it is the general unit – perhaps just the production control room of the mask factory – to lead the realization.

The fact is that when the industrial Internet responds to such emergencies, it can instantly complete the integration and effective mobilization of resources for the entire society. For all kinds of information flow discussed above, if the traditional form is used, the issuing unit has to go through a series of processes such as document preparation, approval, sealing, and delivery, and each receiving unit also has to go through a series of processes before the information can be implemented on the production line. Different units have different response speeds, and the overall response speed is actually determined by the unit that moves the slowest. However, in the industrial Internet scenario, all information flow is completed at the speed of light under optical fiber or 5G, and the industrial scheduling capacity of the entire society will be one step higher than that of human drive.