Identification and Resolution for Industrial Internet: Architecture and Key Technology

As a key component of Industrial Internet, identification and resolution has been considered as a promising technology to realize the interconnections among physical and virtual entities and to promote interoperability of digital objects, which improves the industrial efficiency and transparency of the supply chain. In this article, we focus on the identification and resolution design in the Industrial Internet. A general identification and resolution architecture is proposed to guide how to develop and improve technologies and schemes in terms of the joint requirements of service, role, function, implement, and security in Industrial Internet. Based on the proposed architecture, three key technologies are studied. Specifically, an identifiable digital object (IDO) model is constructed to enable the different Industrial Internet platforms to manage and interact data uniformly. Then, a hybrid structure-based identification and resolution system is designed, based on which identification registration and resolution procedures are proposed. Furthermore, a trustable system based on blockchain is deployed to guarantee the data credibility. Finally, extensive practical experiments validate the effectiveness of the proposed technologies. The proposed architecture and technologies have been used in the practical construction and deployment of national top-level nodes and secondary-level nodes to sustain the identification and resolution services for the Industrial Internet in China.