Abstract
With the increase in natural gas consumption, distributed natural gas supply and transaction have become new development goals of the industrial Internet of Things (IoT) for natural gas. However, there are obvious disadvantages of the existing natural gas pipeline network in aspects of infrastructure warning, multilevel data transmission, automatic transaction, and security. Emerging technologies, such as blockchain, edge computing, and AI have been introduced to address these shortcomings. This article proposes Smart Micro-GaS, i.e., the concept of a cognitive micro natural gas industrial ecosystem based on mixed blockchain and edge computing. Three aspects, multilevel, multiview, and multidimension, are put forward for its design and deployment. Then, based on the most important smart contract algorithm in blockchain, a mixed transaction model for natural gas is established. Finally, a case analysis is conducted on a smart natural gas testbed for data prediction and the proposed smart contract algorithm. The framework proposed in this article makes the natural gas data have multilevel liquidity and realizes diversified transactions.