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Inside:
Connect the physical with
the digital p3
Best practices for industrial
Cloud computing p6
Core technologies make
edge-intelligence possible p10
replace a battery.
40
YEAR
OPERATING
LIFE *
A
t its recent user conference, the always thought- piece. “The readiness and capacity for change is limited,”
ful management of Emerson Automation Solutions said Train.
discussed work’s changing nature. Emerson is expanding its service offerings to help
The U.S. manufacturing sector experienced 4.0% pro- fill the gap. What industry needs, Emerson said, is an
ductivity growth from 1990 to 2000, and 4.7% from 2000 increased focus on education and upskilling along with
to 2007. Analyses of productivity growth statistics can be improved organizational workflows to effectively leverage
highly speculative. At the time, however, experts and media their technology investments. An analysis commissioned
credited computerization for these productivity gains. by Emerson of the organization behaviors of Top Quartile
Since then, productivity growth has stagnated at about industry performers indicated five essential competencies
1.5%. Yet computerization has continued apace. If digita- for the digital era.
lization was the cause of productivity growth in the 1990s Automated workflow allow focus on exceptions requir-
and in the first decade of the 21st century, what caused ing human intervention. Analytics and embedded exper-
the subsequent productivity growth slowdown? tise reduce complexity. Workforce upskilling empowers
Computers today are communication devices in support personnel to acquire knowledge and experience more
of the coordination of work, as much as they are any- quickly. Mobility provides access to information regardless
thing else. If the network is the computer, then advances of location. Change management accelerates institution-
depend on integration, and just 50 years into the com- alization of operational best practices.
puter revolution we’re faced with a multi-layered installed
base. In fact, integration seems to be the constraining Expectations expanding
challenge. Moving forward, while remaining cognizant of “Process control has been digitalized already,” said Pe-
legacy systems, has proved complex and daunting. ter Zornio, chief technology officer, Emerson Automation
Solutions. “Users expect real-time information, embed-
Essential competencies ded expertise, and a closed-loop system. We can now
Another kind of “installed base” is the industrial work do the same thing for other type operations, including
force involved. In the last 40 years, many kinds of work reliability, safety, and energy, for example. In the new era,
were transformed, and quantified, as computerization core production workers will be focused on collaboration,
supported work-process reengineering. interpretation, and analytics, rather than data collection
At the conference, Emerson tackled the topic during a and reporting.”
briefing on “essential competencies for an empowered Where are we at this moment? One last quotation
digital workforce.” taken from the user conference provides a hint:
“The past 30 years have brought fantastic advances “Wireless is arguably the most impactful technology for
in the manufacturing sector, including greater operating industrial manufacturers since the introduction of digital
efficiencies enabled by automation. But the incremental instrumentation more than three decades ago,” said Bob
gains are diminishing,” Mike Train, executive president, Karschnia, vice president and general manager, wireless,
Emerson Automation Solutions, said. Emerson Automation Solutions. “Industrial wireless com-
The silver lining will come with an emerging generation bined with smart sensors are the foundation to support
of technologies able to revitalize productivity gain, as in cloud-based applications, remote monitoring, and other
the former era. However, the work force is the essential IIoT programs over the next decade.” IIoT
www.controleng.com/IIoT IIoT For Engineers NOVEMBER 2017 | 1
IIoT IN THE NEWS
By Dr. Keshab Panda techniques support these efforts. IIoT IIoT are to enable augmented opera-
gives these companies an opportunity tions, human-robot collaboration, ad-
B
ridging the divide between to go beyond Six Sigma, fool-proofing vanced digital-product development,
the physical and the digital many activities and processes related data-driven control of operations, and
worlds, the Industrial Internet to operational efficiency. predictive maintenance.
of Things (IIoT) transforms how com- These trends see support in a survey Early adopter feedback shows that
panies function and how work gets from L&T Technology Services and the transition to an IIoT ecosystem
done, based on gains in sensor and ARC Advisory Group conducted at depends on employee initiative. The
microcontroller technology, connec- this year’s ARC Forum. Half the survey survey also highlights that 42% of
tivity, and analytics. These emerging respondents were with large corpora- business leaders feel that organiza-
technologies are also conceptualized tions having more than $10 billion tional culture acts as an impendent
as Industrie 4.0. in revenue. According to the survey to IIoT adoption. Capital expenditure
Businesses focus on operational results, 57% of business leaders and concerns are also prevalent.
excellence to streamline and tighten organizations embrace IIoT for opera- While about 40% of organizations
production processes. Six Sigma tions-related work. Key focus areas for said their companies are at the pilot
The positive impact of IIoT can be short-term operational efficiency, but it also can have a
long-term influence on resource optimization, product design, and automation. All graphics courtesy L&T Technology Services
by Melissa Topp However, without the ability to data to a selected cloud service. For
connect devices from behind fire- instance, a manufacturer may have
I
ntegrating the Industrial walls and to publish data securely to updated assembly machines with
Internet of Things (IIoT) into IIoT-integrated applications, organi- units equipped for more advanced
traditional supervisory control zations may miss out on the promise networking. This works well for
and data acquisition (SCADA) and of advanced analytics via Cloud com- companies that can afford such ret-
human-machine interfaces scenarios puting. If your organization is consid- rofitting, but might not be the most
delivers multiple benefits. ering an IIoT integration strategy, the cost-effective means of ensuring IIoT
Increased scalability follows from answers to the following questions connectivity.
secure access to multiple locations highlight some best practices. Legacy industrial machinery can be
via cloud platforms, including the connected to an IIoT infrastructure.
popular Microsoft Azure. Hardware 1. Does your organization However, some add-on hardware
obsolescence can be alleviated, as the already have existing IoT/cloud- connection options often prove,
“heavy lifting” of processor-intensive ready hardware? comparatively speaking, cost-prohib-
analysis can be off-loaded. Connectiv- Some organizations planned for itive. That’s where the concept of IoT
ity is enhanced, as increasing num- IIoT’s emergence, to ensure machin- gateway devices comes in.
bers of devices communicate via IIoT ery electronics and discrete devices IIoT gateways are lightweight
transport protocols. in production facilities can transfer devices that act as a bridge be-
tween on-premise communications
networks and cloud services, at a
fraction of the cost of an equip-
ment retrofit. These edge devices
provide “southbound” data con-
nectivity to end devices, completely
on-premises. A device also provides
a “northbound” communication
path for connectivity between itself
and the cloud.
IIoT gateways incorporate strict se-
curity requirements. They serve as the
delivery mechanism between the data
generated and stored on-premise and
that shared with the outside world.
Intel, through its IoT Solutions Alliance
One benefit of Internet-based automation is that it allows program, supports original-design
centralization of disparate operations, and for expertise to be manufacturers with advanced security
more easily brought to bear at remote locations. All graphics courtesy: Iconics features such as unique hardware IDs,
many manufacturers throughout many open-source examples coded connectivity. Additional value can
multiple industries. The protocol can in multiple popular programming be obtained via IIoT connectivity.
cover serial lines (Modbus RTU and languages. MQTT is recommended This includes connected applica-
Modbus ASCII) as well as Ethernet when network bandwidth is a con- tions that are provided through a
(Modbus TCP). cern and should always be used in Cloud-services provider, which take
Simple Network Management tandem with a secure communica- customer data at the edge and use
Protocol (SNMP) allows devices to tion method such as TLS. it for mobile visualization or analysis.
expose useful information to other Hyper Text Transfer Protocol Examples include energy manage-
connected devices. Almost all tradi- Secure (HTTPS) was designed to ment or fault detection and diagno-
tional IT devices can handle SNMP serve requests and responses in a sis, rapid data historian storage and
requests. computing model for Web-page retrieval.
BACnet is the most widely used communication. It can more easily Some IIoT gateway software
open communications standard in traverse firewalls without the need solutions provide seamless integra-
the building automation industry. for specific IT policies that handle tion for these types of applications.
Some organizations might use server request messages and return Off-the-shelf SCADA and other type
a proprietary communications responses in the form of resources interfaces, analytics, and data histo-
method, either in unison with one such as HTML files, content, and rians can connect to a cloud-servic-
of the industry standard protocols or completion status details. es provider, subscribing to an “IIoT
exclusively. Representational State Transfer Hub” from where these applications
Northbound communications (REST)/JSON provides a stateless can ingest the provided data. One
involve additional protocols, with means for IoT-friendly informa- possible use case is energy monitor-
the need for high security levels and tion access. It leverages the HTTP ing, where IIoT gateway software
often using a pub/sub mechanism. transport protocol to deliver data, running on typical IIoT gateway
These protocols include: typically using JSON, which is a flex- hardware can connect to popular
Advanced Message Queuing ible, lightweight format like XML, energy, gas, or water meters for se-
Protocol (AMQP) provides flow- to define its presentation. cure, real-time infrastructure moni-
controlled, message-oriented com- When considering IIoT hard- toring and timely analytics. Another
munication with built-in options for ware devices and accompanying use case is innovative fault detec-
message-delivery guarantees. Au- software solutions, consider both tion and diagnostics, where the IIoT
thentication and encryption is based your organization’s southbound software suite can alert personnel
on popular Internet authentication and northbound communication of actions to prevent equipment
and data-security protocols such as requirements. failures or excessive energy use.
Simple Authentication and Security Cloud-based computing options,
Layer (SASL) and Transport Layer 4. What additional functional- like other emergent technologies,
Security (TLS). AMQP, optimized for ity is needed for the industrial will continue to evolve. A com-
messaging between devices, sup- cloud-based solution? bined IIoT-integrated hardware and
ports read-and-write functionality By this point, it may be known software solution delivers value in
for command and control or indus- what new equipment is needed the forms of equipment monitor-
trial-automation equipment. to connect electronic assets to the ing, predictive maintenance, and
Message Queuing Telemetry cloud, who the preferred cloud- operational efficiency. Cognizance
Transport (MQTT) was created for services provider will be, and what of suggested best practices can lead
SCADA environments and related communication protocols are consid- to more informed decisions for any
networks, using pub/sub to minimize ered most important. organization’s cloud integration
payloads and overhead with appli- Cloud connectivity initially may plans. IIoT
cation-specific, custom JavaScript have been considered to secure the
Object Notation (JSON) or binary benefits of increased scalability with Melissa Topp is senior director of
formats. Widely accepted in IT ensured security, reduced hard- global marketing at ICONICS
departments worldwide, MQTT has ware obsolescence, and expanded (www.iconics.com)
©2017 Hilscher North America, Inc. All trademarks are the properties of their respective companies.
THE IIoT LEXICON
A
s the Industrial Internet of Deploy, update, upgrade, and source and send only the valuable
Things (IIoT) evolves it’s im- maintain large numbers of fraction to a Cloud center.
pacted by the same integra- devices and services. Edge computing is a distributed
tion challenges as previous automa- Transform Big Data into valuable information technology (IT) architec-
tion generations. Besides changing business information. ture in which client data is processed
requirements, many different hard- at the periphery of the network, as
ware and software technologies and Thus, an IIoT product or solution close to the originating source as
applications apply. However, today, must meet challenges related to possible. Time-sensitive data in edge
with open standards, these diverse sensors, connectivity, security, Cloud computing may be processed at the
elements can be melded together to point of origin by an intelligent
‘
deliver solutions. device or sent to an intermediary
In IIoT product and application server located in close geographical
Emerging architectures
development, developers’ goals may proximity. Data that is less time-
include: help companies develop sensitive can be sent to the Cloud for
historical analysis, Big Data analytics,
Support heterogeneous sensors
complex IIoT infrastruc- and long-term storage.
and actuators via the Internet. tures in an integrated Companies must have the means
Integrate heterogeneous wired to manage the edge-computing
’
and wireless connectivity proto- ecosystem paradigm, whether the solution
cols, including Modbus, LoRa, be referred to as an infrastructure,
Sigfox, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and architecture, platform, or server. What
others. services, storage, device hardware, Advantech calls its edge intelligence
Port original software to differ- device maintenance, edge/Cloud server (EIS) solution enables local IIoT
ent hardware, including MCU, analytics, system integration, appli- networks to allow edge intelligence
x86/ARM CPU, GPU, and others, cation development, and so on. The to maximize energy efficiency, reduce
and operating systems that first challenge many companies face privacy threats, promote ease of
include Microsoft Windows, is migrating to an IoT application implementation and modularization,
Linux Distributions, mbed OS, while balancing design time, time- and minimize latencies.
Android, and others. to-market, and risk. IIoT software platform services are
Connect cloud services that might based on three key components: the
include WISE-PaaS, Microsoft Anatomy of a network IIoT node, edge-Intelligence server,
Azure, IBM Bluemix, and others. IoT data can be large in volume. and Cloud services. The following
Maintain data ownership and Applications typically have real-time describes some technology choices
integrity and understand its impli- requirements. Transmitting massive any supplier or using enterprise must
cations for security and privacy. amounts of raw data puts a load on make in developing its platform.
For edge-device development, real time, as data is generated. A The last component is Cloud
“southbound” sensing-device con- predictive maintenance and quality services, with SSL/TLS communica-
nectivity must handle diverse sensing capability serves as a proof-of-con- tions and Intel Security both on
protocols, such as Modbus, OPC, cept for edge field prediction. the edge device and for Cloud. The
BACnet, and Wireless IP/NonIP. These Using companies extend this data service can provide the Post-
protocols can be handled by plug-in framework to develop analytic or greSQL DB and Mongo NoSQL DB
modules that process sensor data, data predictive-maintenance modules via as standard offerings, and supports
normalization, and communications. the architecture’s open standard, a standard integration interface
The solution then handles the based on the ubiquitous MQTT with a wide range of data pro-
“northbound” Cloud connectivity communications protocol and the cessing and storage products. The
and intelligence facilities using the modularizing Docker container dashboard website serves as the
microservice container paradigm to technology. IoT application user interface, and
modularize the different Cloud con- Other technologies, like RESTful displays information via browser or
nections and enable device manage- API, MQTT, and Node-RED, facilitate mobile device through visualization
ment. Similarly, intelligence facilities drag-and-drop application develop- facilities such as Azure Power BI or
also adopt the microservice container ment. Node-RED and the configura- Tableau.
architecture to support the data tion utility make it easy to imple- At end of day, a platform pro-
ingestion workload, such as data pre- ment custom applications. Moreover, vides a marketplace for sourcing
processing and cleaning. well-documented SDK-with-MQTT diverse IoT software utilities, provid-
Perhaps most valuable of all is the sample code and the RESTful API ing pure Cloud solutions such as
on-demand, real-time analytics service interface allow advanced developers database, dashboard, and machine-
that extracts pre-set data features, in to fulfill high-level requirements. learning tools.
Further explication a RESTful API that the client and Component interactions can be
Now let’s look a little more server are coupled loosely and the dominant factor in user-per-
closely at some of the technologies remain independent of each other, ceived performance and network
previously mentioned. allowing either client or server efficiency.
MQTT is a simple, lightweight to be coded in any language and Scalability to support large num-
publish/subscribe messaging pro- improved upon at will, which leads bers of components and interac-
tocol used for constrained devices to system longevity and ease of tions among components.
and low-bandwidth, high-latency, evolution. The simplicity of a uniform
or unreliable networks. The service The RESTful API specifies what interface.
publishes its capability and data to it can provide and how it can be Modifiability of components
an MQTT broker and subscribes to used, and requires that details such to meet changing needs, even
specific topics for input interfaces. as query parameters, response while the application is running.
A RESTful API defines a set of format, request limitations, public Visibility of communication
functions that developers use use/API keys, methods (GET/POST/ between components by service
to perform requests and receive PUT/DELETE), language support, agent.
responses via HTTP protocols, such callback usage, HTTPS support, and Portability of components by mov-
as GET and POST. Because REST- resource representations should all ing program code with the data.
ful APIs use HTTP as a transport, be self-descriptive. Resistance to failure at the
they can be used by practically any The properties impacted by the system level despite failures of
programming language and are constraints of the RESTful architec- components, connectors, or
easy to test. It’s a requirement of tural style include: data.
Edge computing is a distributed IT architecture in which client data is processed at the network periphery, as close to the originating
source as possible.
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