The internet and the development of ICT technologies have changed the word in the last 20 years by revolutionizing industries, such as retail, media distribution and finance. Currently there are rumblings of a similar revolution in the manufacturing sector and the process industry. Consulting companies, such as McKinsey and Accenture have released reports citing the untapped economic potential of Industrial IoT (internet of things) a technology that will bring new business opportunities and change the industrial operation. Thus the question for any manufacturing or process industry professional is: What is industrial IoT?
The industrial IoT (IIoT) is can be barely defined as a network of multiple devices by communication software. This communication enables the devices to monitor, collect, exchange, analyze and react to changes in their environment or operation without human intervention. Now, if this sound familiar to you must be an industrial automation expert, since the above definition could be a description of most tasks at your job for the past 20 years. Thus, this brings several questions: What makes Industrial IoT different from other current industrial automation technologies? What are the benefits of IIoT? Is the untapped potential of IIoT just hype?
What makes IIoT different from other current industrial automation technologies?
Superficially, IIoT does not seem to bring anything new to table since, PLCs and industrial networks protocols operate and connect devices together, DCS and SCADA offer real-time monitoring, data acquisition and advanced control. However, the main focus of all of these technologies is to keep the process operating as desired. Meaning, that while SCADA systems are capable of storing large amounts of data, and provide a gateway towards the creation of reporting and optimization tools; in reality their application is limited to few study cases. The promise of IIoT is to build on current industrial technologies and offer better access to industrial data, ease the creation and deployment of optimization.
What are the benefits of lIoT?
Traditionally, industrial historians have provided data storage and acquisition capabilities which have been used by process experts and academics to create optimization technologies, abnormal event management and advanced control. However, all these tools can only be used by specialist. Until recently, historians have been characterized by providing poor access to the data and usability. Furthermore, archaic practices licensing cost (limited number of IOs) have affected their adoption.
Academia yearly creates and publishes multiple real-time monitoring and optimization techniques. However, most academics have not developed commercial products based on those techniques and while commercial optimization products exist their implementation requires a long period of consultation.
IIoT technologies main focus will be easing the acquisition and access of industrial data allowing the creation new products and services. This will be achieved modernizing the data acquisition schemes, such as the use of cloud technologies allowing free flow of information between different business units. Thus taking away industrial data from its automation niche and opening its use to maintenance, business and logistic units. For example, let imagine a predictive maintenance application for a gas boiler. Currently, the development of this application would require the access to the private network of the plant where the boiler is located, access to the SCADA system and the historian all with different certifications. Once, the historian has been accessed it is necessary to acquire specific tags needed for the development of the application and export that data to the development machine, which should not be the same as the machine from which data is gathered. After this, is possible for the development team to create its predictive maintenance application. When the application is ready deploying it would require integrating the current solution to the SCADA system and a mechanism to transfer the information from the automation system to the maintenance unit.
Under the IIoT scheme it would be possible to only access the data corresponding to the boiler, without granting access to the whole automation system. This can be achieved by storing the process data on the cloud and accessing it through a Web API. Thus, is possible to only send the relevant information directly to the interested actors.
Is the untapped potential of IIoT just hype?
Business and IT professionals are the main supporters of IIoT since it would allow them access to a new market of services. Their assumption is that data will allow IT professional to change the industry in the same manner as Google, Amazon and Apple did it. However, they seem to assume that current operation schemes are static (optimization is their main selling point). But they seem to forget that modern industrial processes seek constant improvement, and thus their projections might be optimistic. The ability to collect data and integrate new applications is contained within current technologies. Proof of this is that there are several optimization products on the market. The main hurdles of these applications are not poor interfaces and limited usability. But the creation of commercially viable application requires a huge investment of time and knowledge which in most cases cannot be replicated easily. Thus current optimization application require a long time of consulting before they can be used to their full potential.
Ultimately, the potential of IIoT will reside in its applications but its framework is promising. Nevertheless, uncapping the full potential of industrial data, by allowing easy access and creating new schemes for the implementation of analytics and optimization technology, can only be beneficial. At the same time, IT specialist would need to learn the physical and operational hurdles that working on Operation technology entails.
