Smart Manufacturing Connectivity for Brown-field Sensors Testbed
This article gathers information from the Industrial Internet Consortium’s (IIC) Smart
Manufacturing Connectivity for Brown-field Sensors Testbed. The information and insights
described in the following article were captured in an interview conducted by Joseph Fontaine,
Vice President, Testbed Programs at IIC with Dr. Michael Hilgner, Manager Consortia & Standards
at TE Connectivity.
The Testbed is carried out in two phases: on an initial demonstration case (phase I) and a real
industry deployment (phase II). The interview was carried out after the completion of phase I and
thus refers to the results and learnings from there.
programmable logic controllers (PLCs) which
govern the real-time control (sub-)systems.
There are generally three options for
retrieving data from these systems for the
use in enterprise IT systems:
TESTBED PROFILE
The Smart Manufacturing Connectivity for
Brown-field Sensors Testbed is a joint effort
of the IIC members, TE Connectivity (TE), a
world leader in connectivity and sensors,
and SAP, a world leader in enterprise
applications in terms of software and
software-related service revenue. Further
collaboration partners are ifm, a worldwide
leader in sensors, controllers and systems
for automation, and the OPC Foundation,
the organization defining the industrial
interoperability standard OPC Unified
Architecture (OPC UA). The Testbed was
approved in April 2016 by the IIC Steering
Committee. Public information is available
from the Testbeds section of the IIC's
website.
1. To incorporate
technology into
themselves
communication
the sensors
2. To extract the data from the first
aggregation level, i.e., the IO
modules
3. To provide the data through the
governing PLC which normally
requires some re-programming
In brown-field installations, option 3 is not
favorable or even not possible as the PLCs,
which were once selected and programmed
to process the automation sequence only,
are typically far from modern and hence not
capable of processing the volume of data
required by advanced (cloud-based)
analytics. Furthermore, the original
programmer is often not available anymore
and thus, re-programming a PLC which has
been running an optimized code for years
implies a considerable risk.
Objectives
The main objective of the Testbed is to
provide a high volume of sensor data from
brown-field manufacturing installations to
enterprise IT systems in near real-time. In
the discrete manufacturing domain, which is
characterized by a strictly hierarchical
structure, also referred to as the
“Automation Pyramid,” sensors are typically
connected by input/output (IO) modules to
Option 1, to extract data from the sensor and
communicate it, has its cost limitations. At
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IIC Journal of Innovation