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  • Author Author: cstanton
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What's Stopping the Internet of Industrial Things?

Is it even Needed?

There, I said it, is that controversial enough? It might be. You have likely heard of the Internet of Things (IoT) by now and what it is, "let's connect everything to the internet! so we then know what it is!" and my suspicion is, that it is not necessarily needed. Or perhaps the concept is just too big to comprehend how it applies right now, let us think about and discuss this, I suggest first we start small.

 

Starting Small

For a lot of people the first thought that comes to mind with IoT is making a smarter home via home automation. There is nothing more awesome than feeling in control and being informed whether your plants are in need of a water, if your home is secure or keeping a close eye on your front door via a camera when Amazon ring the doorbell. We have even read that a controlled sprinkler system allowed a home owner to save their premises from being burnt down where their neighbours suffered great losses. The success stories are slowly pouring in, we are surely better connected, are we not? We can even look after our pets. Though for every success story there is often a horror tale, but we shall not talk about cars (or Die Hard 4 and its hacked power plant).

 

However, when we are looking at the scale of the home, we have an isolated scenario, a sandbox, a location where frankly we can do whatever we like. Here in begins to lie the crux of the scale of IoT and its increase to a level where it could be considered to be applied to, let us say for example, a humongous steel production plant.

 

Thinking Big

I was introduced to industrial environments from a young age, my father being an industrial shift engineer working on the huge and heavy electronics of British Steel. Regularly I would hear tales of trudging up long ladders, getting covered in extra fine coke dust and crud, to take care of the electronics for a conveyor belt system that would put a shopping till to shame, and motors the size of a large living room with junction boxes the size of a human. So, too, came the tales of blast furnaces and metal working, but also of the systems that controlled these. From the computer systems that people sat at to systems which you would not hear about from home.

 

Programmable Logic Controllers (PLC) are the electronics that are the heavy duty, industrial armoured electronics against the elements and truly harsh conditions. Your typical Beaglebone Black would not cut it where a PLC can do the grunt work, (though with the industrial BBB we're getting better). This is what I see as the type of system which the Internet of Things is trying to replace or supplement in an industrial environment, and it is not going to be cheap to do so.

 

So just how do you go from a system that is setup to use PLCs to one that wants to be connected to the internet? Or is it already on the internet? Unfortunately for this information, my father retired from Corus as it was then known, before becoming Tata Steel and did not see what upgrades were done to the system.

 

However, I suspect that the engineers of this community may have seen similar or even more.

 

What is Stopping the Internet of Industrial Things?

You tell me! You do not have to be specific, I suspect that a number of people are under Non-Disclosure Agreements with their company, but let us be general about this shall we?

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  • I think what accelerates IIoT is if there are clear benefits for businesses and users. Some great examples involve better management of solutions, and better prediction of failing hardware. One real example I'm aware of concerns remote locations. The ability to retain existing sensors, and using gateways to get that data over IP to a centralized location meant better management, and reduced costs. Reliability over the Internet is achieved through redundant paths i.e. similar to the example mentions he'd seen.

    Another real example is industrial gear sold to customers where additional new sensors can be applied and data is sent over the mobile network and is used to sense degraded behaviour so that engineers can be dispatched to a site before the machine completely fails.

    These are both still kind of basic use-cases, and take advantage of cheap Internet, modern sensors, and data gathering and processing technologies to attain what wasn't easy or economical to achieve in the past. Regarding secure solutions, the appropriate sum of money needs to be invested in security (depends on what needs to be secured and how valuable the data is). On the other hand for home IoT, some businesses skimp on security (and some non-technical consumers might not appreciate the hidden cost of security in the better products/solutions) and thus they get sub-optimal offerings..

  • in reply to shabaz

    and is used to sense degraded behaviour so that engineers can be dispatched to a site before the machine completely fails.

    Seen these systems ... sometimes it might work, but generally its just before total failure (usually the controller, power or something else)

     

    The problem with security IMO is that most sales pitches are just that, they highlight the advantages and seldom if ever think about the negatives.

    Unless compnies have a hacker on board, they are not aware fo the potential risks in connecting xyz to their networks.

    Many companies might not even have such IT inhouse and instead rely on external providers.

     

    Mudz raised some very valid points about delays, and imagine what happens when your ISP decides to do maintenance...

     

    Mark

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  • in reply to shabaz

    and is used to sense degraded behaviour so that engineers can be dispatched to a site before the machine completely fails.

    Seen these systems ... sometimes it might work, but generally its just before total failure (usually the controller, power or something else)

     

    The problem with security IMO is that most sales pitches are just that, they highlight the advantages and seldom if ever think about the negatives.

    Unless compnies have a hacker on board, they are not aware fo the potential risks in connecting xyz to their networks.

    Many companies might not even have such IT inhouse and instead rely on external providers.

     

    Mudz raised some very valid points about delays, and imagine what happens when your ISP decides to do maintenance...

     

    Mark

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  • in reply to mcb1

    I'm no mechanical engineer can't even fix my car usually : ( so I need to research more to know the specific industries that benefit from it but apparently some things like mechanical wear over time perhaps can be detected due to vibration or sound, to the point that Bosch offers a service for some industries to detect this proactively. I don't know the name of their service unfortunately nor take-up.

     

    Today businesses already connect to public SaaS providers and trust them with sensitive data. I know the industry you're in may not perhaps due to legislation or risk analysis, but others do.

    For SaaS too, security was cited as a primary concern only around 5 years ago. It is still a concern but now security solutions exist to the extent that many (perhaps the majority of businesses today?)

    will now trust certain reputable providers. Loads of businesses trust Salesforce.com for example with financial-impacting information.

     

    Back to IoT, an IoT solution doesn't have to connect to a public cloud, it could be a private or hybrid cloud. Security has to be considered for the entire solution, but it's not insurmountable provided we're willing to engineer a solution. The business of course has to be willing to pay for it.

    Reputable vendors won't supply the solution without security considerations appropriate to the industrial use-case and the data requirements (and legal requirements). The solutions that exist today won't suit every industry, but neither did SaaS applications five years ago, and they have gained significant traction to the point of it being normal for many businesses (not all). It's not a perfect analogy of course, but I see no showstopper for certain industries (and neither do they because they have deployed IoT solutions). Utility firms will be deploying smart meters as we discussed on another thread.

     

    ISPs can and do perform maintenance, but no vendor worth their salt will deploy a solution that would fall over when this occurred. Tests have shown that many-9's of availability is possible with redundant paths (I recall some uni tested this at least 5 years ago, with residential DSL). There are also service level guarantees if customers are willing to hop off the public Internet onto private networks offered by service providers at additional cost (And anything that requires a low-latency response can still be achieved with local processing; some solutions bring tremendous benefit even with delayed reporting, all control doesn't need to be remote).

    There are IoT deployments like oil fields connected via the same access technologies as Internet offerings, e.g. with (say) satellite links, for the cost and monitoring benefits mentioned earlier.

    Other use-cases have redundancy using (say) DSL and mobile network links.

     

    Your points are very valid, some businesses (maybe many!) will invest in solutions that will be insecure, possibly dangerous and not fit for purpose.

     

    EDIT: Not IoT nor industrial related, but the sheer idiocy of an engineer developing a wireless burglar alarm system that allows a replay of 433MHz encoded data to unlock it is staggering:

    IOActive Labs Research: Remotely Disabling a Wireless Burglar Alarm

    Apparently it has sold in the millions, and yet anyone with an SDR dongle could capture it... I'm guessing burglar alarm standards/legislation isn't too high for residential alarm systems. Bizarrely the manufacturer states in this case that using the web app is more secure. I would run a mile from trusting the product at all given the replay issue though. Who knows what other holes they may have.

  • in reply to shabaz

    mechanical wear over time perhaps can be detected due to vibration or sound

    Yep, we use this on the Primary Radars to detect bearing wear on the antenna.

    This is by no means a fine one day, broken the next, so hardly an application for IIoT, and maybe there are some that can be fitted to smaller motors.

     

    Tests have shown that many-9's of availability is possible with redundant paths

    That is right, but there are often single points of failure ... ie the copper or fibre line to the business.

    We are fortunate that we have multiple entry points for our data feeds, and we try for this at the remote ends .... BUT it isn't always possible.

    Enivitably the big yellow cable locator finds the right spot

    image

    We even had a farmer/contractor adding a new fence line get it every 7m or so.

     

     

    Yes you can build in redundancy but the more complex, the more complex the fallover protocols to ensure you don't get loops.

    We had one of those 'moments' (that is still not publicly released yet, so no details here) and was despite the best efforts of our network engineers.

     

    Sadly many of the commercial products don't even include dual supplies, or if they do, they have complex checking which delays when the equipment will accept that supply as good.

    (Luckily that 'check delay' got discovered before it went live)

     

     

    I think that like IoT this might be a solution waiting for a use.

     

    Mark