A Horizontal Taxonomy for the Industrial IoT
1.
SUMMARY
The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) promises to build new classes of distributed intelligent
systems and thereby fundamentally upgrade the world’s most important industrial
infrastructure. However, there is today no system science for the IIoT. We have no clear way to
classify systems, evaluate architectural alternatives, or select core technologies.
This paper posits that we can develop a “taxonomy” of IIoT applications based on their system
requirements. Further, we can reduce the space of requirements to a manageable set by focusing
only on those that drive significant architectural decisions.
Based on extensive experience with real applications, we suggest a few divisions and explain why
they impact the architecture. Each of these divisions defines an important dimension of the IIoT
taxonomic model. We thus envision the IIoT space as a multi-dimensional requirement space.
This space provides a framework for analyzing the fit of architectures and technologies to IIoT
applications.
2.
THE IIOT NEEDS SYSTEMS SCIENCE
The breadth, depth, and variety of life on Earth is overwhelming. The systems science of life, ak a
Biology, would be impossible without a way to classify life forms by their “architecture”. The
biological taxonomy allows scientists to divide organisms into logical types, identify
commonalities, and construct rules for understanding whole classes of living systems.
The breadth, depth, and variety of the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) is also overwhelming.
The science of IIoT systems needs a similar organized taxonomy of application types. Only then
can we proceed to discuss appropriate architectures and technologies to implement systems.
A taxonomy logically divides types
of
systems
by
their
characteristics. The first problem
is to choose top-level divisions. In
the Animal Kingdom, you could
label most animals "land, sea, or
air" animals. However, those
environmental descriptions don’t
help much in understanding the
animal. The “architecture” of a
whale is not much like an octopus,
but it is very like a bear. To be
IIC Journal of Innovation
Figure 1: Environment Does Not Indicate Architecture
Dividing animals by “land, sea, and air” environment is scientifically
meaningless. The biological taxonomy instead divides by
fundamental characteristics.
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