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Different industrial users have different IIoT goals, but they can all benefit from a simplified connectivity approach
The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) means different things to different people. End users from all sorts of industries and businesses incorporate IIoT elements to realize value in ways that suit their unique needs.
In the most general terms, implementing an IIoT strategy involves connecting sensors and automated systems located in challenging manufacturing and process locations to create a unified data network. This enables extensive remote monitoring and data acquisition, deeper operational analysis, and autonomous machine-to-machine interaction. Common goals for users are smarter operations, improved equipment effectiveness, and cost reduction. But whether the user is the operations or engineering group in a plant, an original equipment manufacturer (OEM) who builds manufacturing machinery, or perhaps a systems integrator (SI) tasked with tying it all together, everyone agrees that IIoT implementation should be easy and secure.
At the simplest level, IIoT implementation involves getting field data into cloud systems so it can be processed and shared among many users and applications. That data is most often the domain of operations technology (OT) personnel and systems, conventionally incorporating devices like programmable logic controllers (PLCs), human-machine interfaces (HMIs), and supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA). While these OT systems can perform a certain amount of computing in the field, or transmit raw data over to the information technology (IT) side of the business for additional processing, they are not very good at either compared with modern options.
This article discusses how new options for industrial edge computing provide a simple and secure alternative approach to achieving different IIoT connectivity objectives. It presents the general architectural improvements that edge computing affords and explores their application in solving the specific challenges of the three user groups mentioned above: plant operations and engineering teams, OEMs, and SIs.
Who wants what?
While everyone is looking for solutions that are good, fast, and cheap, those three attributes rarely intersect. A better way to define the attributes of a robust and optimal IIoT solution is to examine the needs and goals of different end user groups.
Operational end users. End users at manufacturing businesses and production plants all need good data. There are operators who rely on...