From Building To Urban Beauty

Smooth transportation, convenient medical experience, efficient urban governance, energy-saving buildings and buildings are embedded in the blueprint of "smart city". In recent years, with the development of Internet of things, cloud computing, artificial intelligence, 5g and other technologies, smart city is getting closer and closer to us.

As a big space of human life, city is also an important carrier of economic and social development, which makes it a gathering place of innovative elements. The building is an important unit of a city. Starting from the single building, it is the first step to endow the city with "wisdom".

In November last year, Midea's central air conditioning division was renamed as the HVAC and building division, focusing on the construction of intelligent building ecology. From a single supplier of HVAC products in the past, it has transformed itself into an integrated solution provider for building construction. Through a number of self-developed, self-produced and self-sale smart building solutions, Midea's central air-conditioning division has helped accelerate the transformation and development of the city.

"The market knows the concept of smart buildings, but not many people really understand it." According to Guan Jinwei, President of the HVAC and building division of Midea Group, this is one of the main difficulties encountered in the promotion of smart buildings. In his opinion, smart building should include two aspects: comfort and energy saving. "From smart building to smart city, the first thing to do is to digitize buildings."

However, there are not many buildings built in China that can be digitized in the past. Now the so-called smart city is more from the perspective of security, not connecting all the buildings“ From this point of view, there are many things that can be done in the future. " Guan Jinwei made such a judgment.

Reduce the waiting time of office workers by intelligent system

Since the second half of last year, Midea central air conditioning began to promote the internal industrial structure adjustment. In July, strategic adjustment was made to divest to C business and focus on to B business; In November, it was officially renamed as "HVAC and building business division", which was transformed from a single HVAC product supplier to a building integrated solution supplier; In December, it announced that it had reached strategic cooperation with Lingwang elevator and formally entered into elevator business.

The acquisition of Lingwang elevator is an important layout of Midea in the smart building industry chain. At present, high energy consumption is a common problem in large-scale public buildings in China, especially the proportion of energy consumption in HVAC and elevator parts. According to Guan Jinwei, HVAC accounts for 50% of the energy consumption of the whole building, followed by elevators.

In his opinion, ten years ago, the pattern of central air conditioning was similar to that of today's elevator industry, "now domestic elevators are generally unable to enter high-end buildings and high-end real estate. But we judge that after 5-10 years, the market share of Chinese and foreign capital in the elevator industry will be reversed. "

The smart building is expected to become a breakthrough to promote this change.

"Customers only say they want smart buildings, but they often can't come up with specific requirements. At this time, we need to co create with customers. Customers describe what their concept, experience, space and functional requirements are. We design together and restore the original design concept through solutions." Guan Jinwei frankly said that at present, there is no clear definition of intelligent building in the industry, so it is difficult to ask customers to put forward clear "wisdom" demand in the actual operation process.

For example, "customers want to wait as little as possible for elevators during rush hours, but what are the means to achieve this? He doesn't know. We need to tell him that we can solve the problem of passenger flow in rush hours by 50% through the physical dispatch intelligent system, which is more of an interactive process. " Guan Jinwei believes that compared with selling central air conditioning in the past, the business unit should communicate with customers more and provide intelligent solutions for its pain points, which has become "closer to users".

At present, Midea's goal of focusing on building as a whole has emerged. In addition to the acquisition of Lingwang elevator, Midea also established Shanghai Meikong Intelligent Building Co., Ltd., and established intelligent building research institutes in Shanghai and Hangzhou, specializing in the research of building digital platform.

So far, Midea's HVAC and building division has covered all aspects related to smart buildings, such as HVAC system, intelligent building, elevator business, energy management, etc., focusing on building intelligent ecology and growing together with the changing environment.

"At present, we have taken a better step from the original single equipment manufacturer to the overall building solution provider, and the whole framework has been set up." According to Guan Jinwei, at present, 80% of the business of the division still comes from HVAC, but he hopes to form two or three business pillars in the future, "HVAC, elevator, there is still an unknown." According to Guan Jinwei, Midea will not rule out entering more fire and security fields in the future, "because it is all highly related to buildings.".

Focus on three major areas

In April this year, Midea HVAC and building business department officially released the smart in one business strategy, focusing on the layout of the whole industrial chain of smart building and building three major nervous systems of smart building.

Among them, the whole series of building automation products of Alcon, such as intelligent temperature control and start stop products, can be understood as the "autonomic nerve" of buildings“ "Peripheral nerve" refers to the integration of special business systems based on industry scenarios, such as smart outpatient and ward in hospital, smart platform and efficient computer room in rail transit. The "central nervous system" represents the whole life cycle service for smart buildings, which is responsible for the integration of buildings and buildings.

"Building the building into a warm, perceptible and thinking life body" is the goal of Midea to construct the three nervous systems of smart building. In short, if architecture is compared to human beings, the hope of beauty can construct the mind, heart, skin, skeleton, respiratory system and metabolic system of architecture. For example, the HVAC system in a building is like a human respiratory system, and an elevator is a metabolic system (pedestrian / logistics).

The headquarters of Midea Shunde and the global innovation park under construction in Shanghai became the first batch of experimental fields. In Shanghai's Midea Global Innovation Park, with a construction area of nearly 400000 square meters and a total investment of more than 6 billion yuan, the design thinking mode is adopted to invite users, operators, designers, engineers, facilities and equipment suppliers to jointly create. Starting from the user journey of five typical roles, the user experience of each scene is planned, Through the mode and ecological integration ability of Midea's three major nervous systems, the wisdom concept is applied to the planning, selection, debugging and linkage between specific and numerous facilities and systems from top to bottom. And with the continuous change of technology and requirements, we will maintain the ability of iteration and build a smart building for the future.

Guan Jinwei believes that relatively speaking, "energy saving" can be quantified through data, while "wisdom" is often difficult to reflect. In addition, in his opinion, smart buildings should not only make building users feel more intelligent, but also make building operators feel more intelligent.

Take the current elevator maintenance as an example. Twice a month, it is impossible for workers to climb the 30 storey and 60 storey building and check every part of the elevator once“ We hope that in the future, sensors can be installed on the core parts of each elevator. Through the analysis of the sound, frequency, temperature and data transmitted by the sensors, we can judge whether there is a problem with this part and whether it needs to be replaced in advance. These belong to the category of intelligent buildings. "

According to reports, Midea's HVAC and building division will take the lead in focusing on rail transit, smart hospitals and headquarters level office buildings. In this regard, Guan Jinwei explained that this is because Midea has always had a good foundation in the field of rail transit; The smart hospital is the most complex subsystem in the whole smart building. "After the hospital is built, it is relatively easy for us to do other things."; In addition, there is a large demand in the market to turn the headquarters building into a smart building.

According to the third-party data, Midea ranks first in China's central air-conditioning market in 2020 with a market share of 14.47%. At the same time, in the rail transit industry, with a market share of 30.01%, the HVAC system of urban rail transit will rank first in 2020.

In addition, Midea will further explore the application of smart buildings in real estate, infrastructure, public utilities, commercial services, industrial and agricultural production, gradually improve the intelligent degree of buildings and improve the current situation of building energy consumption.

Open platform compatible with third party devices

With the continuous development of urbanization, people's vision and imagination of smart city is increasing day by day. The concept of smart city is put forward under the background of the increasing number and population of cities. With the continuous development of cities, they are faced with problems such as traffic congestion and inefficient management, so the reform is put on the agenda.

According to the "global smart city spending guide" released by IDC, the global digital city related technology expenditure is expected to reach about $124 billion in 2020, an increase of 18.9% over that in 2019. Among them, China's market expenditure will reach 26.6 billion US dollars, ranking the second in the world. In December last year, the Ministry of industry and information technology proposed in the "industrial Internet innovation and development action plan (2021-2023)" that it is necessary to cultivate a number of system integration solution suppliers and expand large-scale application in smart city and other fields.

According to Guan Jinwei, there are three main types of participants in China's smart city field: foreign enterprises represented by Johnson Controls and Siemens, platform enterprises represented by Huawei and Alibaba, and a large number of third-party enterprises.

Among them, foreign-funded enterprises may face the situation of acclimatization when entering the Chinese market, while platform enterprises such as Huawei and Alibaba tend to obtain building and user data for other business services - regarding "smart building" as a means rather than an ultimate goal; The third-party enterprises are faced with the dual problems of light asset investment and not doing enough, and being unable to control the hardware equipment to achieve deep intelligence.

In contrast, Midea, which has both software platform and a large number of hardware facilities, has undoubtedly injected a new force into the industry.

"Midea's current investment should be the largest in the whole industry." Guan Jinwei, for example, said that when many software intelligent building companies want to control hardware such as elevators, the reality is that none of the leading enterprises in the industry has opened software platforms to intelligent building companies.

Air conditioning is the same, "because a large part of intelligent buildings is energy-saving and energy-efficient. Efficient and energy-saving HVAC system needs to start from the whole logic control system to do the whole algorithm. As a third-party intelligent building software company can not do this, but Midea is a smart building platform that combines software and hardware. " Guan said.

From point to surface, the construction of smart city can not be reached by one enterprise. Guan Jinwei further pointed out that Midea smart building itself is an open platform, and its digital platform can be compatible with all third-party equipment, and Midea equipment will also be compatible with other people's equipment. "Our advantage is that we can provide customers with the whole solution."

From this perspective, there are many things that Midea can do in the future.

"For example, some of our recently developed HVAC systems will all be connected to the network. We will cooperate with the State Grid of China. The State Grid will simply collect the operation data of our equipment and adjust the energy at the peak and trough, which is of great benefit to the energy conservation of this city." Guan Jinwei believes that smart buildings are one of the most basic components of a smart city. The combination of buildings constitutes the city; The connection between buildings is a process of giving "wisdom".

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