Ecmweb 7815 Industry Internet Things Pr
Ecmweb 7815 Industry Internet Things Pr
Ecmweb 7815 Industry Internet Things Pr
Ecmweb 7815 Industry Internet Things Pr
Ecmweb 7815 Industry Internet Things Pr

An Industrial Strength Web

Oct. 16, 2015
As the Industrial Internet of Things takes shape, factories of the future will have to be ready to deftly manage a cascade of data — a challenge that will put plant operations, infrastructure, and culture to the test.

Things are due to change on the factory floor. The machinery, systems, and processes manufacturers use to produce goods are on track to gain a digital voice, audible courtesy of the next frontier in digital communications — the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT). Should that come to pass, industry could be turned on its head.

A subset of the Internet of Things (IOT), a growing web of connected, networked communications devices and products, the IIoT, or Industrial Internet, may be the more practical, “blue-collar” version. It references a future where the very means and tools of production are wired up en masse to produce highly detailed and revealing operational data. From there, the hope is that data can be extracted, crunched, shared, and ultimately leveraged by stakeholders far and wide over potentially vast digital networks.

For the Industrial Internet of Things to truly flourish, a massive change must take place in many industrial facilities across the country (Copyright Getty Images News).

In a sense, things used to produce other things are primed to join what amounts to a far-reaching, web-enabled digital chat room of sorts. And their input — amplified by sophisticated addressable sensors and data analysis software and readily translatable across platforms and systems — will become central to the relentless drive to improve and perhaps revolutionize core industrial processes.

Related

Estimates of the nature and value of the IIoT’s impact vary, but one frequently cited statistic is attention-grabbing. A 2012 General Electric Corp. paper suggests that about 46% of the global economy — or nearly $33 trillion in global output — could be a beneficiary of the Industrial Internet.

But, at this point, the grand vision of the IIoT is much clearer than the exact path to that promised land. To fully flower, the physical infrastructure of many manufacturing operations will have to evolve. Not only will many industrial components have to be replaced and upgraded, but the infrastructure that holds it all together will also have to adapt, including electrical power distribution system, communications backbone, supporting information technology (IT), and operations technology (OT) functions to name a few.

That’s not all. Outside the factory walls, hardware suppliers, software vendors, systems integrators, networking companies, and others that will stand up an IIoT are still in the early innings of formulating comprehensive technology solutions that are up to the task. And, watching it all from above, groups organized by companies with a stake in the IIoT (either as vendors or users) are busy shepherding stakeholders to develop “community” standards, protocols, architectures, and best practices. They’ll be essential in charting the smoothest path forward to a connected environment, where success will be defined by how reliably data can be generated and analyzed, and the degree of participation, access, collaboration, and sharing that’s achieved.

Coming into focus

But an IIoT that comes anywhere close to the scope or structure of the Internet as we know it is likely years off. It will be at least several years, most experts agree, before even basic structural issues are resolved, and the scaffolding of a functioning IIoT begins to appear.

It’s still too early to say exactly what it will look like, but webs of interconnectedness could encompass factories within a single company, vertical supply chains, and even entire industries — all fueled by data gathered at each step of the process of adding value to finished goods.

Stephen Mellor, chief technical officer with the Industrial Internet Consortium (IIC), a not-for-profit coordinating efforts to build an IIoT framework around common architectures, interoperability, and open standards, characterizes the IIoT as a work still very much in progress. Many small-scale versions are already operating; oil and gas well monitoring is a prime example, he says, offering solid evidence that the IIoT is conceptually sound. A core challenge lies in addressing organizational obstacles to achieving the scale needed to draw out the power of an extensively connected industrial world.

“This will be a continuous activity over decades, and we’re going to be connecting more and more things, one factory at a time perhaps, to gather the necessary benefits from that,” Mellor says, “Over time, we’ll discover different ways of doing things, which will require more connectivity, more data, more of everything. At this point, though, we’re still just peering through the fog.”

The IIoT’s foundation, of course, will be laid in the industrial space, where plant engineers and OT professionals will increasingly have to work hand-in-hand with IT personnel to design extensively connected facilities and production systems. Digital sensors capable of detecting and transmitting a menu of status and condition readings from capital equipment will constitute the base building blocks of the data stream feeding the IIoT.

According to a paper from LSN Research published in 2015, “Smart Connected Operations: Capturing the Business Value of the Industrial IoT,” adoption of IIoT technology is still in the early stages — with 34% of companies currently investing or planning on investing in IIoT technologies over the next year. This data is based on more than 500 respondents to the firm’s Manufacturing Operations Management online survey. Based on the chart above, the market is clearly not yet in broad adoption of the concept, but early adopters will help build the business case.

Next-generation, sensor-equipped production assets are populating more plants, but the pace of introduction remains slow. Many manufacturing and industrial operations remain heavily invested in yesterday’s technology, and have been slow to upgrade/modernize their production lines. But there’s growing awareness of the benefits of automating processes and incorporating elements of “smart” manufacturing. And that may accelerate the transition to an IIoT-friendly environment.

Still, the manufacturing world likely has some work ahead of it to get positioned to harvest any benefits from a prospective IIoT. Jeff Fedders, an Intel Corp., IIoT standards strategist who also chairs another group working to establish IIoT standards — the Internet Protocol for Smart Object Alliance (IPSO Alliance) — harbors no illusions about the difficulty of bringing many factories up to speed.

In a typical factory, he says, “there’s a rat’s nest of protocols that need to be simplified and merged with what we call this intersection of IT and OT, a coming together of the best known methods of both worlds into a framework that serves the IIoT’s requirements and usage models.”

Infrastructure challenges

The initial challenge for those looking to create a next-generation facility with IIoT capabilities someday, he says, is to fashion a “smart” building. It’s the foundation, Fedders says, for what General Electric Co., a tip of the spear on the IIoT push, calls “brilliant” factories — ones increasingly capable of being managed and controlled via time-sensitive networks (TSNs). An emerging technology, TSNs might evolve to become a critical piece of the IIoT framework, he believes, because they yield fast, guaranteed response times needed for high-speed data crunching as well as remote, and even automated, control functions.

“The first piece of creating this ‘brilliant’ factory’ is to convert the infrastructure — the building itself, the energy grid, control systems, communications systems — to where it’s all running on the IIoT before you put your operations piece on top of it,” he says. “And they will require a low latency, high bandwidth digital communications network structure that’s both secure and capable of managing a diverse set of components.”

Industrial settings will also be challenged to develop a more robust wireless communications infrastructure. Wireless is seen as critical to the IIoT’s evolution due to the sheer number of components that will be sensored and the need to shuttle more of the data they generate to cloud-based servers for storage and computing. Wireless will also be an indispensable capability in environments where the IIoT is leveraged for remote control and monitoring of equipment.

Mike Justice, president and CEO of Grid Connect, Inc., a Naperville, Ill., supplier of network communications protocol technology into markets that include industrial, has been watching developments in the broad IoT and home automation space. When it comes to the IIoT, he’s skeptical of the industrial sector’s state of readiness.

“I don’t see them as leading the way when it comes to working with new protocols and networking technologies,” he says. “It’s rare, for instance, to find WiFi in a factory setting because they don’t seem to trust wireless technology. They want to control access, and there’s a very big fear of someone hacking into their systems and shutting them down.”

Security considerations

Indeed, data and network security is emerging as a real concern as talk of an IIoT grows more serious. The prospect of effectively making equipment networkable, and, in turn, controllable, raises the dark specter of entire plants malfunctioning or shutting down and sensitive information being exposed.

Generally operating now with closed, walled-off systems, factory owners contemplating the IIoT will have to rethink the security piece. With the prospect of more wirelessly sensored components and growing automation and remote control capabilities, IT and OT departments will have to collaborate on designing a secure environment built for a new era of expanded interconnectedness.

“You’re no longer going to be able to have ‘admin’ as your password for all the devices in your plant,” Mellor says.  “A lot of things are secure now because they’re locked away in a cabinet or because systems grew up organically solving specific problems, so you have obscure protocols and ways of connecting this, that, and the other. Over time, as connected devices become more ubiquitous, there will be standard ways of communicating, so the old notion of security isn’t going to work anymore.”

IIoT security concerns could be further heightened by the central role that virtual servers residing in the cloud will play. With a likely explosion in the amount of data generated, off-site data centers that use the cloud will offer essential supplementary resources. But one IIoT-services executive is growing more convinced that security fears are receding.

“A lot of companies are concerned about their data and how it’s going to be used, who has access to it, how it will be managed, but those concerns are easing rapidly,” says Udaya Devineni, senior vice president, U.S. Services, for Schneider Electric, Andover, Mass. “I think we’re getting used to the context of saying that we are in the world of having our data in the cloud, and the reality of how secure that environment really is.”

Laying the foundation

That may be true, but security is one of the concerns of organizations working to develop a master blueprint for the IIoT. Led by groups like IIC and IPSO Alliance, a diverse collection of stakeholders is heavily invested in efforts to develop interoperability standards and a technology framework for the IIoT. The guiding philosophy is that the IIoT can’t be built and fully function without a standard, agreed-upon global architecture in place. It’s the foundation, they say, for ensuring that technology solution providers’ products work together, data and operations are fully protected, an extensive ecosystem can be established, and a solid business case can be made for investing in it.

The push for standards and a common lexicon for creating and managing this evolving world of connected things is coming from the ground up. The IPSO Alliance is tackling the question of how things that produce data in the IIoT will be identifiable, addressable, and able to communicate securely. The group, first created to advocate the value of smart object connectivity, is now focused on developing what it calls an “immutable identity model” for the new generation of smart objects — not tethered to humans — that will be communicating within the IIoT.

“In IPSO, we’re defining what a registry will look like for ‘things’ that are autonomous and capable of discovering and creating data flows, information and services independent of a back-end control system,” Fedders explains.

Meanwhile, IIC is starting to show progress — now 18 months into its work on behalf of 200 member companies. It has recently hit one milestone: publication of an IIoT reference architecture document detailing prospective technologies and standards that stakeholders could jointly pursue. It’s also close to wrapping up a prospective security framework for an IIoT, Mellor says, as well as coordinating the development of a “testbed” program that lets member companies work on brainstorming, creating, and evaluating specific functional elements of an IIoT.

“We’re keen to focus on innovation,” says Mellor, “and we see these testbeds as places where people can check out whether certain components of an IIoT framework can actually work.”

While still in its formative stages, an Industrial Internet is coming, insist IIC, IPSO Alliance, and other advocates. Its rollout may follow a circuitous and even halting path, they say, but at some point a deployable model will be built. When complete, it will allow industry to begin migrating more of its data-rich and dependent operational functions to a collaborative, networked ecosystem.

The IIoT will overcome hurdles, Mellor says, because it promises to deliver what every company in the business of making things wants: lower cost production, attainable with efficiency improvements that can be as small as one percent. With the ability to generate and leverage data — and use it to better manage and control processes — efficiency gains are sure to follow. But getting there will demand a willingness to embrace change.

“If you lock the doors on your factory, and you don’t connect to this Industrial Internet, nothing has to change,” says Mellor. “But if you want to gain that one percent efficiency, you’re going to start looking at how you can connect the pieces more broadly and gain more direct control over your operations.”     

Zind is a freelance writer based in Lee’s Summit, Mo. He can be reached at [email protected].

SIDEBAR: German Industry 4.0 Initiative Shadows IIoT Work

Strategies to overlay processes used to bring goods to market with technologies undergirding the Internet have many practical ends in sight. One is a byproduct of the visionary Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), and may be neatly embodied in a German government initiative to put that country’s industrial modernization program on technological steroids.

It’s Industry 4.0, a push to create an idealized manufacturing world of the future where cutting-edge information and communications technology (ICT) spawns new “cyber-physical” production systems that leverage automation, machine learning, and virtualization to fundamentally change how things are made.

The national campaign, ostensibly on behalf of the German industrial sector, is tracking a U.S.-centric effort to construct an architecture for a globally focused IIoT. While they share a broad vision of leveraging next-generation ICT to optimize industrial processes, Industry 4.0 and the IIoT are really on different tracks that seem to be heading in roughly the same direction. The future — global industrial and manufacturing processes fundamentally transformed to be intelligent and autonomous — may lie where they both join up.

Communications-led change is the cornerstone of the IIoT and Industry 4.0. The former, though, may be more descriptive of the sprawling communications networking architecture that advanced production practices will ultimately be built around. The latter is probably closer to a tangible, and perhaps even utopian, description of what next-generation manufacturing, specifically, can look like if all of this technology is brought to bear. And it’s one that eclipses mere efficiency improvement, in the view of one observer.

“Efficiency to me means keeping on with what you’re doing, but just get better at it,” says Jeff Fedders, chairman of the IPSO Alliance, an industry group working to formulate standards that will allow smart objects to communicate within the IIoT. “I think what we’re talking about is transformation, and this is what Industry 4.0 is trying to articulate — that how we produce things will be very different because of information and operations technologies and other new technologies like 3-D printing. Factories and their processes are going be very different.”

Industry 4.0 details that future. It’s one of 10 Future Projects included in the German government’s High-Tech Strategy 2020 Action Plan. It comes with detailed descriptions of what’s possible and how German industry can attain a new level of sophistication with coordinated research, standards development, and government assistance.

Germany Trade & Invest, a government agency, says Industry 4.0 embodies nothing less than a fourth industrial revolution, “one which promises to marry the worlds of production and network connectivity in an Internet of Things (where) ‘smart production’ becomes the norm in a world where intelligent ICT-based machines, systems and networks are capable of independently exchanging and responding to information to manage industrial production processes.”

While German companies stand to be the first beneficiaries of Industry 4.0, any of its technological breakthroughs are almost certainly destined to become part of the global knowledge base. That’s partly why IIoT groups are watching Industry 4.0 closely. Stephen Mellor, chief technical officer with the Industrial Internet Consortium (IIC), an organization coordinating efforts to build an IIoT, wants to make sure the groups are staying roughly aligned.

“The question will be how to bring the two together because we don’t want fragmentation,” he says. “If we have too many different standards being developed, that can be a mess. The single biggest challenge in working with them is making sure that doesn’t happen.”

About the Author

Tom Zind | Freelance Writer

Zind is a freelance writer based in Lee’s Summit, Mo. He can be reached at [email protected].

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