IIC Journal of Innovation 6th Edition | Page 43

At the highest level, the testbed program exists to substantially impact the IIoT market. And for any complex IIoT implementation to be successful, there are diverse technologies that need to be integrated. Testbeds serve as demonstration proof points of interoperability, architectural patterns and technologies. This lets the IIC establish best practice examples for IIoT system implementers. The IIC does not seek testbeds that address minor applications; testbeds must deliver real technical acceleration with significant economic impact on success. They must answer real questions and deliver real results. In the end, the IIC testbed program intentionally takes risks. We fully expect some efforts to fail. That’s OK. Testbeds exist to test something. The main outputs should be learning and feedback. With ambitious goals, clear process, and community involvement, the testbed program can be a driver of the IIC’s success. As the saying goes, “nothing ventured, nothing gained.” Venture Boldly! 1 Digital Solar Plant Testbed Renewable energy is a transformative solution that will meet energy as well as economic challenges globally. However, utility companies face several issues as global interest in solar energy soars – from mitigating operational and regulatory risks to maintaining efficiencies and improving capacity utilization. The Digital Solar Plant testbed includes framework for solar plants plus platform integration, providing the necessary insights and dashboards for plant status, forecasting and data analytics. Manufacturing Quality Management Testbed China has been the “World’s Factory” especially for manufacturing labor-intensive products, for more than two decades. In recent years, as the world is moving towards Smart Manufacturing, the Chinese industry has been feeling the pinch from facing the enormous challenges of the number and diversity of factories needing to be upgraded. By managing the quality measures throughout the production line and using them as the key factor to demonstrate the effectiveness of the improvement while modernizing the existing factory, the testbed team adopted the IIC’s Industrial Internet Reference Architecture (IIRA) and constructed the testbed with advanced data collection, analysis and process management capability. Special Report – Why We Build Testbeds: First Results After three years of testbeds making groundbreaking innovations and discoveries in IIoT, the Industrial Internet Consortium is pleased to announce a free report giving you an inside look at how our testbeds have matured. Why We Build Testbeds: First Results reflects on our astounding growth from two to twenty-six testbeds. It describes specific results from several testbeds and draws some conclusions across multiple testbeds in the program. 1 “Venture Boldy” is an excerpt from IIC Blog by Stan Schneider, CEO & Founder Realtime Innovations, Inc. December, 2016. http://blog.iiconsortium.org/2016/12/index.html - 42 - November 2017