Build Digital Intelligence Advantages and Smart Wanhua Chemical

Xu Jianguang, General Manager of Digital Intelligence Department, Wanhua Chemical

The chemical industry is closely linked to daily life, and its development has a significant impact on the national economy. Currently, China holds a leading position in terms of its production capacity for various chemical products. The petrochemical industry in China is no longer simply large, but is becoming strong.

The chemical industry is characterized by its large production scale, the continuity of its complex production process, and harsh operating conditions. How to improve levels of automation to ensure production continuity, improve efficiency, and increase safety is a topic that the industry must address.

As one of the leading enterprises in the chemical industry, Wanhua Chemical Group Co., Ltd. (WanHua Chemical for short) covers five industrial clusters: polyurethane, petrochemical, fine chemicals, emerging materials, and future industries. With its mission of "Advancing Chemistry, Transforming Lives", Wanhua Chemical is a top player in the development of new chemical materials.

As WanHua Chemical expands its global business and integrates its industrial chain, the company has placed great importance on leveraging digital tools and IT to effectively address the challenges of expanding its business scope, particularly in areas like collaboration, efficiency, and control.

In terms of ICT infrastructure development, facing the dual challenges of the continual iteration of front-end applications and explosive growth of business data, WanHua Chemical has partnered with Huawei to build an all-in-one network. By deploying an intelligent control system, the two parties have achieved precise management of network access permissions across multiple dimensions, including the user, terminal and region. Leveraging virtual private networks, we have created a multi-purpose network with security isolation, significantly reduced complexity, and enhanced scalability. This has provided Wanhua Chemical with a secure, agile, and efficient digital foundation to support rapid growth.

Wanhua Chemical is advancing scientific research in new areas such as catalyst synthesis and material structure design, driven by AI. It is also deeply involved in the advancement of predictive maintenance of equipment.

In this issue of Transform, we interviewed Xu Jianguang, General Manager of Digital Intelligence Department in Wanhua Chemical, to explore how AI can further benefit the strategic transformation of enterprises. Furthermore, we explored how Wanhua Chemical has crafted a systematic approach called the "Wanhua Practice" following over ten years of exploration.

How does Wanhua Chemical plan the digitalization infrastructure construction for each production base and research center?

Wanhua Chemical's ten major production bases span Asia and Europe, with an overall focus on digital infrastructure development based on global collaboration and hierarchical empowerment. Emerging bases prioritize automation reinforcement, while mature bases aim for intelligent decision-making upgrades. This phased approach to intelligent upgrades aims to achieve global data sharing, optimize resource allocation, and minimize costs to meet the demands of global collaboration and differentiated development.

The Wanhua cloud architecture adopts a hybrid cloud model. The group's private cloud has been deployed for core service systems, and edge cloud nodes are gradually built in each base to process production data. Following the group's information security policies, external agile IT services are connected to the public cloud to enable rapid deployment and on-demand usage of services.

What is WanHua Chemical's strategic plan for AI, and what practical experiences can be shared?

WanHua Chemical plans to leverage AI to advance scientific research in new areas such as catalyst synthesis and material structure design, nurturing future industries. We have built a computational power platform based on Huawei Cloud Stack hybrid cloud and an AI platform based on Huawei Cloud ModelArts to support the application of AI in the chemical industry. Additionally, we have collaborated with Huawei on exploring practical applications in areas such as the real-time online optimization (RTO) of production processes, predictive maintenance of equipment, and review of standard operating procedures (SOPs).

For example, in predictive equipment maintenance, we use Huawei's Pangu prediction model to detect equipment exceptions and predict equipment aging, supplementing equipment fault detection. In SOP writing and review, we use the LLM combined with engineering techniques to conduct text quality audits on SOP documents in the campus, aiming to assist engineers in improving SOP review efficiency.

Overall, our AI strategy will span across Wanhua Chemical's entire business process, bringing momentum into our digital transformation. This will help us seize opportunities among fierce market competition and achieve high-quality development.

Why did Wanhua Chemical choose to collaborate with Huawei?

Wanhua Chemical chose to collaborate with Huawei due to Huawei's extensive technical expertise and practical experience in ICT infrastructure and computing. Huawei provides stable and reliable solutions to support our digital transformation.

Since our collaboration began on the campus network, Huawei has been exploring ICT infrastructure, AI, and digital transformation with us. Huawei is aware of the challenges in industrial AI applications and has dedicated numerous expert resources to work closely with us on solving algorithm and engineering issues, bridging the gap between AI algorithms and industry operations to facilitate the implementation of AI. This has laid a solid foundation for our collaboration in the field of AI.

In the future, we will continue to work together to push the boundaries of AI in the chemical industry, jointly setting a new benchmark for intelligent computing.