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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?

Parents

  • Hi - sorry i'm a bit late to this conversation. . . but it's an intriguing topic starting all the way at the beginning with

    Is it even Needed?

     

    This topic has been eating at me for a while – I have felt that something major was being overlooked – and that something just dawned on me,  "What are we going to do with all that data?"

     

    Of course we *can* connect trillions of sensors to the Internet and give them each an IP and a place to send their data/messages. But what are we going to do with all those trillions of data sets? Industrial applications will inherently have a problem over more consumer-IoT focuses in the sheer amount of data points that can be created and monitored. 

     

    We’re in our infancy with figuring out how to hadoop terabytes of data, how to store it, how to access quickly enough that it’s still relevant . . .  And that’s all before you start working on identifying patterns or evolving on to predicting patterns which will eventually become (in some blue sky world) a way to force/enforce patterns.

     

    It sounds like the challenge is in the code.

Comment

  • Hi - sorry i'm a bit late to this conversation. . . but it's an intriguing topic starting all the way at the beginning with

    Is it even Needed?

     

    This topic has been eating at me for a while – I have felt that something major was being overlooked – and that something just dawned on me,  "What are we going to do with all that data?"

     

    Of course we *can* connect trillions of sensors to the Internet and give them each an IP and a place to send their data/messages. But what are we going to do with all those trillions of data sets? Industrial applications will inherently have a problem over more consumer-IoT focuses in the sheer amount of data points that can be created and monitored. 

     

    We’re in our infancy with figuring out how to hadoop terabytes of data, how to store it, how to access quickly enough that it’s still relevant . . .  And that’s all before you start working on identifying patterns or evolving on to predicting patterns which will eventually become (in some blue sky world) a way to force/enforce patterns.

     

    It sounds like the challenge is in the code.

Children
  • in reply to kellyhensen

    Hi Kelly! Now you've done it ; ) Proponents and opponents switch on the Rocky music.. ; )

    I remember reading somewhere that as a generalisation data is more valuable the fresher it is, and then it loses value,

    but then after a period of time it can gain value again, as people start to discover more things they can do with it.

    A lot of the processing will have to occur locally too (e.g. using a local server or SBCs), so that not all noise needs to be

    processed in a cloud.

    As you say, a lot is blue sky thinking, and in a real world maybe there is too much complexity to extract the most from the

    data because it will become irrelevant by the time the data has been found, fetched and analyzed. However, I think

    it is fair to say we are currently underutilizing what data is easy to obtain with little hardware and software effort but

    we need a vast amount of smart thinking from software engineers to make the most of it all - the challenge is in the

    code to me sounds like a very accurate conclusion.

  • in reply to kellyhensen

    Kelly,

     

    Industrial Iot data sensors will indeed generate huge amounts of raw data. Some sensor networks will have 10,000 sensors outputting data for processing. It would be plenty expensive to simply push out the raw data for remote processing. So new approaches to IoT data management will probably be dreamed up by some clever engineer (hopefully a member of the element14 community!). Here's three options of which I am aware:

     

    1. Data can be storied locally and pushed out when required

    2. Data can be collected at concentration points or a gateway where it is fused together or aggregated in a compact form and then transmitted for processing

    3. Data can be processed locally and only sent out when an event of significance occurs.

  • in reply to kellyhensen

    There are lots of compelling applications for IoT, but I don't think the majority of people have seen a killer app they just can't live without yet. But it is early days for IoT and more useful apps will be developed. The day IoT literally saves someone's life, they will become big fans. It may not be quite that dramatic, but I am sure IoT success stories will start to become known. There is still some worry that the benefits of IoT will not accrue to everyone, just some rich corporations will benefit at our expense. And corporations will try.

    It is up to us to think up ways it can benefit us

    • there are more of us (than corporations) to think up applications
    • we have more needs than corporations

    But do we control enough resources to make use of our advantage?