Three Main Themes in the Industrial Internet of Things
focus of Smart Maintenance and Operations discussed in the previous section. The Information
Domain provides functions for gathering data from the assets (as well as other domains), and
transforming them into insights through analytics. The Application Domain focuses on the
functions for orchestrating the operations of the assets to achieve optimal performance and high
efficiency, globally, based on the analytic results from the Information Domain – the focus of the
Global Optimization theme. Finally, the Business Domain consists of business functions to provide
business objectives and constraints for optimization and to offer business support such as
resource, logistics, work scheduling and customer relationship management for the smart
operation of assets. The IIRA highlights the importance of integrating operational and business
functions in order to achieve the full benefits of the Industrial Internet.
4.
LOCAL AUTONOMY
As we work to realize the benefits of Smart Maintenance and Operations, and Global
Optimization, it is tempting to build systems with a centralized architecture – one in which data
from assets are collected and analyzed in a centralized system, likely in a public or private cloud,
where operational decisions are made based upon the results of the analytics. This approach is
likely a basic model for many initial IIoT deployments because of the overall simplicity of design
and the efficiency offered by a large sharable pool of generic computational resources. This
model would work well for use cases in which the operations of the assets involve few and
infrequent decision-making from the centralized system. On the other hand, a centralized
architecture may not work well in other cases. There could be technical constraints such as the
latency involved in the decision-making loop and an undesirable dependency of the asset
operations on the quality and availability of the network. There could also be economical
constraints such as the cost of uploading a large volume of data over wireless networks.
One less obvious concern in a centralized architecture is the ever-increasing complexity of the
system. The problems we seek to solve in the Industrial Internet are complex problems that are
only getting more complex. As we drive toward