Three Main Themes in the Industrial Internet of Things
team of security experts from the Security Working Group in the Industrial Internet Consortium
(IIC) is delivering a security framework to address the security challenges. Another team within
the Technology Working Group is starting to examine the challenges we are facing in the
convergence of Information Technology (IT) and Operational Technology (OT), largely driven by
the development of Industrial Internet. The challenges in building Industrial Internet ecosystems
to realize the full potential and benefits of the Industrial Internet are also being raised and have
generated much interest in the IIC.
3.
GLOBAL OPTIMIZATION
With connected assets, we can go beyond the theme of Smart Maintenance and Operations that
focuses on optimal operations per asset – to seek a higher operational efficiency at the system
level; in other words, across fleets of assets. In seeking efficiency globally, we may require a
coordinated increase in the level of operations at some assets and reduction at others based
upon business objectives. An optimal global conditional plan might be developed to orchestrate
the operations of the assets. The development of such a plan is based on the analysis of the
combined operational intelligence and business insights and objectives, taking into account such
factors as the availability of resources, the costs of the operation and the demands of the output.
The global plan would then be dispatched to the individual assets to scale their operations up or
down dynamically, with updates at increasingly shorter time intervals as technology improves.
We see this Global Optimization of asset operations as the second theme of the Industrial
Internet. We describe below a couple of examples to illustrate this theme.
The first example is concerned with electricity generation. Today, an increasing