What’s New at the IIC
Powering Up in 2018
By Stephen Mellor, Cheryl Rocheleau & Howard Kradjel
With the flip of the switch, we’ve powered into 2018; illuminating the challenges, shedding light
on burgeoning tasks of delivering a trustworthy Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) in which the
world’s systems and devices are securely connected and controlled to deliver transformational
outcomes.
The Industrial Internet Consortium (IIC) is explicitly interested in all vertical domains that can be
considered ‘industrial’. 1 For example, we have an interest in manufacturing, transportation and
energy, to name just a few. We wish to add value to operational technology experts in all these
domains, and more. But we are also interested in interoperability between those domains. An
electric vehicle, for example, needs to interoperate with transportation infrastructure, and it
needs to interoperate with the electric (smart) grid. Moreover, this electric vehicle comprises a
large number of manufactured components as well as an astonishingly large amount of software.
These components have to be able to interoperate with every single sector, and each sector has
its own architectural requirements, yet they all need to work together. Testing for
interoperability is a primary reason for IIC’s testbed program.
This poses a problem for the IIC: we can’t do everything at once. While there is value in breadth
(otherwise how could we talk about interoperability?), we have to have enough depth to be able
to talk credibly about how IIoT can be usefully incorporated into a given vertical. Then we might
be able to be useful.
This is why the IIC has instituted ‘focus areas,’ which are vertical domains where we contact the
experts, build liaisons with their various bodies and companies, inspire testbeds and so on. This
1
We have built a taxonomy of vertical domains and sectors to help us organize use cases, among other reasons, but
the ‘taxonomy’ is necessarily an enumeration based on an abstraction: what does it mean to be ‘industrial’?
The technical drivers for IoT and IIoT are much the same: low-costs sensors and computing, facile management of
large amounts of data analytics and so on. But the business drivers are different. In consumer-oriented IoT, cost is
key, while in industrial IoT, return on investment is more important. Similarly, security is important in IoT, but a
failure of security in an industrial setting can be fatal.
For example, we would likely consider ‘Retail,’ with point-of-sale terminals and little else to be mostly an IT system.
Connect it to a global supply chain with additive manufacturing, logistics and automatic re-stocking and the business
drivers cause the system to have ‘industrial-strength’ requirements. That’s what would make this system ‘industrial,’
not that it’s a retail application.
IIC Journal of Innovation
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