Innovative Applications of 5G in Petrochemical Industry: Challenges and Opportunities

Petrochemical industry is an important pillar industry in the national economy. It has industry characteristics such as high-value equipment, complex processes, long industrial chains, high risks, and great environmental protection pressure. It also faces industry pain points such as non-transparent equipment management, difficult inheritance of process knowledge, low-level collaboration in the upstream and downstream of the supply chain, and high pressure on safe production. The petrochemical industry has an urgent need for digital transformation and needs to comprehensively improve the digital levels of equipment management, knowledge management, supply chain management, and safety management. Currently, in petrochemical parks, wired access still dominates the network, with wireless networks such as 4G and Wi-Fi as supplements. The existing network capabilities can hardly support the ever-expanding business scale, and there are pain points such as insufficient scalability, low intelligence level, and data sharing. As a new-generation mobile communication network, 5G has made positive progress in vertical industry application fields, which is of great significance for the petrochemical industry to improve its intrinsic safety and clean production levels and realize digital, networked, and intelligent transformation and upgrading.