VIEWPOINT
The Technical Feast of the Asian Games
The 2023 Asian Games, held in Hangzhou, China, were a historic occasion. This was the first major multi-sport event since the Covid pandemic, with over 12,000 athletes from 45 countries competing in a 16-day extravaganza. The games showcased the latest innovations in and out of the arena, such as the emergence of eSports, the expansion of Alipay’s third-party payment service to international bank cards, and the integration of AI, VR, and cutting-edge digital technologies.
The highlight of the event was the ‘Big Lotus’ stadium, a state-of-the-art venue with a capacity of 80,000, specially designed for the games. The stadium not only offered multimedia facilities for an immersive spectator experience, but also boasted advanced assurance systems powered by AI and data assets to ensure a superior user experience.
The Power of the Intelligent Digital Twin Solution “RADICAL”
China Mobile Zhejiang collaborated with Huawei SmartCare team to develop an Intelligent Digital Twin solution called “RADICAL” (Real-time, Assurance of user experience, Digital twins, Intelligent, Converged data governance, Assets ready, LLM), to ensure a seamless customer experience at the event. With the high 5G traffic volumes, ultra-dense networking was crucial to provide the optimal user experience at the Big Lotus stadium. Moreover, near real-time data (with less than 1-minute delay) was needed for troubleshooting, and decision-making data had to be delivered within 3 minutes, much faster than the usual 10-60 minutes.
To deliver an optimal customer experience, data from diverse sources is essential, and the quality of this data is pivotal in providing timely and pertinent information. Huawei’s Smart DataCube, an integrated data engine, ensures low latency, superior quality, and consistent data production through real-time data quality control. This guarantees the precision of real-time data, supporting a dynamic and high-pressure environment. Furthermore, Huawei’s data governance service can furnish a direct data source for training large-scale models, thereby facilitating their application.
The Intelligent Digital Twins solution “RADICAL” played a key role in ensuring the desired customer experience levels at the Asian Games’ Big Lotus stadium. Huawei’s SmartCare solution, acting as “RADICAL”’s data engine, collects and aligns data from various sources such as OSS, BSS and social environment. This data is then consolidated around specific entities or Places of Interest (POIs), such as the Big Lotus stadium, to create a digital twin. AI processing is then used to support specific business scenarios such as large-scale event assurance, hot OTT experience assurance or roaming assurance.
The RADICAL solution also uses Large Language Models (LLMs) to create a new smart cockpit for user experience management, enabling multi-channel human-machine interaction through different situations: the big screen of monitoring room, the medium screen of desktops and laptops, and the small screen of smartphones. This allows “Anyone” from the assurance team to access relevant user experience information at “Anytime, Anywhere” through a “chat” mode, in a real-time, accurate, and convenient way. This greatly simplifies the cross-departmental collaboration model, while significantly improving the production efficiency, creating a new paradigm for user experience management.
While many vendors work with LLMs capable of handling massive datasets, Zhejiang Mobile and Huawei differentiates themselves through its expertise in telecoms and telecoms data, particularly OSS data. This knowledge, combined with an understanding of network behavior, enables operators to comprehend the behavior of specific user segments, such as heavy live online shopping lover or mobile gamers, and assurance experience and design targeted offerings for them.
A Unified Framework with Diverse Applications
China Mobile and Huawei are actively collaborating with the TM Forum, providing support in various areas, including projects related to autonomous operations. One such project is the Digital Twin for Decision Intelligence (DT4DI), which aims to establish an industry-standard Decision Intelligence framework. This framework seeks to integrate Digital Twin (DT), Artificial Intelligence (AI), and other technologies with Decision Intelligence (DI) and business process practices. The goal is to develop standards that can handle complex decision-making problems in scenarios where data is the cornerstone. In September, at DTW2023 held in Copenhagen, the project “Techco practicing decision intelligence for sustainable growth” participated by Zhejiang Mobile and Huawei won the Catalyst Award presented by TM Forum.
Converged data operation, enables AI and LLM, plays a crucial role in facilitating digital operation transformation across numerous areas. These include enhancing network maintenance and optimization, refining network planning and construction, aiding in more targeted marketing, and enabling data monetization. Adherence to the DT4DI architecture is a key aspect of Huawei’s strategy, as the amalgamation of DT and decision intelligence can be leveraged to enhance business outcomes.
It’s important to note that Intelligent Digital Twin Solution “RADICAL” has applications beyond large-scale sporting events like the Asian Games. It can be utilized in a multitude of use cases, such as accurately identify tourists and their hots OTTs, and provide OTT experience assurance; accurately identify hotspot areas for live online shopping services, and provide key area experience assurance, safeguarding the development of tourism and live streaming economy. It can also be deployed in high-risk vertical industry scenarios, like the mining industry, where near real-time refresh of IoT data is required. In such scenarios, the IoT data is analyzed, modeled, and applied to digital twin apps, which can assist manufacturers in optimizing the processes of production, transportation, warehousing, and selling, thereby ensuring efficient, safe, and intelligent decision-making.
Overall, the case of the Asian Games assurance is very prominent because it uses the strongest capabilities of the RADICAL Intelligent Digital Twins solution. However, RADICAL should not be merely considered as a user experience assurance platform, it should be regarded as the digital connection infrastructure for city management, as the digital economy becomes a larger share of the GDP. It can provide indispensable basic data for multiple digital economic activities, effectively promoting the development of the digital economy.
