China Unicom andHuawei Won the TM Forum Digital Transformation World Summit 2021 ‘AI, Data and Insights’Excellence Award

[UK, London, October 8, 2021] China Unicom Intelligent Network Innovation Center’s AI-based network operation management platform project won the ‘AI, Data and Insights  Excellence Award at the Digital Transformation World Summit 2021 (DTWS 2021) hosted by the TM Forum. This project is based on the China Unicom’s intelligent network platform architecture, and it is a next-generation intelligent O&M solution jointly developed by China Unicom and Huawei. The TM Forum Excellence Awards recognize the world's leading companies for their innovative achievements spanning digital transformation, business and IT agility, customer centricity, cross-industry partnering and collaboration, and product and service innovation.

China Unicom and Huawei Won the TM Forum Digital Transformation World Summit 2021 AI, Data and Insights Excellence Award

With the advent of 5G, network operations of telecom operators are undergoing comprehensive transformations. Networks are offering more and more services, and users have higher expectations for quality experiences. Moreover, as networks become increasingly complex, automation and intelligence are vital solutions to improving the consumer’s network experience. Operators’ Network O&M are becoming more difficult and the OPEX remains high, so it is urgent to use new technologies such as big data, automation, and intelligence to improve efficiency, reduce costs, and optimize the system.

The China Unicom Intelligent Network Innovation Center aims to "innovate network products, enable intelligent operations, and realize business value" and it builds an intelligent operation product R&D team. Intelligent network O&Ms are implemented based on the new man-machine collaboration mode. AI intelligence finds cross-discipline and cross-domain notifications, covering wireless, transmission, power, and environment devices, implementing automatic fault compression and correlation. Big data and AI are used to predict dynamic indicator thresholds of 1000+ KPIs and provide early warnings before faults affect the end users, implementing fault prediction and prevention. The knowledge graph accumulates more than 800 fault diagnosis tree model libraries to implement automatic root cause diagnosis of faults. After identifying the root cause of a fault, scenario-based APIs are automatically invoked to implement fault self-healing and network autonomy. The AI algorithms are used to evaluate the value contribution of the network by base station. On the premise of ensuring good user experience, it can realize multi-network collaboration and intelligent energy saving, improving the intelligent network operation level, reducing costs and increasing efficiency.

Example: AI-enabled Network Fault Management Solution

Taoye Zhang, general manager of China Unicom's Intelligent Network Innovation Center, said: "China Unicom and Huawei have jointly explored and promoted digital transformation in the intelligent O&M field, and achieved results. The capability engine based on the network AI platform provides many intelligent applications in fault correlation, fault prediction, network monitoring, network optimization, preventive maintenance inspection and energy saving. For example, intelligent monitoring and troubleshooting has been used in more than 50 scenarios on 2G, 3G, 4G, and 5G networks. The diagnosis success rate is over 90%, the intelligent inspection efficiency was 20 times more productive, and the annual AI energy saving exceeds 100 million yuan. As the pace of digital transformation continues to speed up in the future, China Unicom will continue to accelerate the evolution of network intelligent operations and enlighten the future. "

Yu Lu, Director of Huawei Network Assurance & O&M Service Dept, said: "Huawei enables telecom operators to accelerate their transformation to digital O&M through open platforms and knowledge assets. And Huawei conducts in-depth discussions and cooperation with telecom operators and global partners such as TM Forum, China Unicom on digital O&M to help customers achieve business success.”