An industrial internet platform creates a new era for the coal industry in Shanxi province

The Shanxi Coal Industrial Internet Platform was launched in Taiyuan on March 27, 2024. Developed by Shanxi Jinyun Interconnection Technology, the platform aims to support the upgrade and digital development of Shanxi's coal industry – an industry for which it is quickly becoming a model.

Shanxi is the first province in China to roll out a provincial industrial internet platform for the coal industry. This platform draws on the technical support of partners such as China Unicom and Huawei and provides advanced, cost-effective intelligent products and solutions with unified standards, data formats, and architectures (called the "Three Unifications" for short).

The platform has proven sufficient to meet the intelligent transformation requirements of the local coal industry, helping coal enterprises reduce costs while amplifying the positive effects of digitalization. The Shanxi Coal Industrial Internet Platform is an integrated industrial internet platform with a large AI model at its core. It includes an app store, a mining AI model platform, an operation support platform, and a cloud computing center.

The app store is a transaction and service platform for intelligent mine products and solutions aimed at ecosystem enterprises, integrated delivery enterprises, and coal production enterprises. The store provides open and transparent prices, helping coal production enterprises select the products and services that best suit their needs while reducing the trial-and-error that often drives up decision-making costs.

For ecosystem enterprises, the store has an admission authentication system. Admitted enterprises can access the mining AI model platform, a large amount of scenario-specific data, and the cloud computing center's resources to develop and release premium, yet reasonably priced, intelligent products. This helps ensure that traded commodities meet the platform's "Three Unifications" requirements.

Finally, the standard products and services provided on the platform help integrated delivery enterprises quickly and affordably replicate intelligent coal mine solutions across the industry.

As previously mentioned, the Coal Industrial Internet Platform was developed by Shanxi Jinyun, a subsidiary of Shanxi Capital Investment and Operation. Jointly built by China Unicom and Shanxi Jinyun, the platform's cloud computing center is the largest fully national-developed intelligent computing center in Shanxi. Its first-phase supports 64 petaflops of computing, and will eventually be scaled out to over 200 petaflops to support AI applications across the province as well as training and inference for complex AI algorithms and machine learning models. This can reduce the cost of application development by over 80%.

Additionally, the platform uses Huawei's Pangu model for the mining industry, which supports intelligent vision and prediction model training and application. Zhao Hongyan, Deputy Governor of Shanxi Province, said that Shanxi presents optimal conditions for AI training, thanks to its numerous coal mines and diverse application scenarios. Coal mining enterprises can integrate the mining AI model with other cutting-edge industrial technologies and learn from the experience of other ecosystem partners to quickly roll out industry applications and products that use AI to improve quality and efficiency. The Coal Industrial Internet Platform aggregates a number of industry ecosystem strengths to enable intelligent mining and accelerate the implementation of AI across the industry. The platform has created a special channel for industry data accumulation that can leverage Shanxi's diverse coal mining scenarios. This facilitates application development and data governance, informs production decision-making with data, and improves efficiency and safety within the coal industry. The platform is also helping the province find a suitable approach to convert Shanxi's resource endowment into economic productivity.

At present, the platform has served 260 ecosystem partners and hosts over 380 intelligent products in the app store. These products are handily meeting the needs of intelligent coal mine construction. The platform utilizes a powerful AI model to establish a robust AI operating system that includes central training, edge inference, cloud-edge collaboration, learning while using, and continuous optimization. It provides a strong foundation for future growth and prioritizes cutting-edge technology development so that users can stay up-to-date with industry standards and ensure their intelligent products are secure, advanced, standardized, open, and highly functional. Wang Hongqiao, Vice President of the China National Coal Association, has praised the platform's development and construction, emphasizing the importance of promoting Shanxi's experience nationwide and working together to achieve high-quality development.