A Horizontal Taxonomy for the Industrial IoT
understood, animals must be divided by their characteristics and architecture.
It is similarly not useful to divide IIoT applications by their industries like “medical, transportation,
and power.” While these environments are important, the requirements simply do not split along
industry lines. For instance, each of these industries has some applications that must process
huge data sets, some that require real-time response, and others that need life-critical reliability.
Conversely, systems with vastly different requirements exist in each industry. The bottom line:
fundamental system requirements vary by application and not by industry, and these different
types of systems need very different approaches.
Thus, as in biology, the IIoT needs an environment-independent system science. This science
starts by understanding the key system challenges and resulting requirements. If we can identify
common cross-industry requirements, we can then logically specify common cross-industry
architectures that meet those requirements. That architecture will lead to technologies and
standards that can span industries.
There is both immense power
and challenge in this statement.
Technologies that span industries
face many challenges, both
political
and
practical.
Nonetheless, requirements and
architectural similarity that span
Figure 2: Industry Does Not Indicate Architecture
industries is a clear fact of the
Similarly, dividing IIoT applications by “medical, power, or
systems in the field. Leveraging
transportation” environment is scientifically meaningless. To make
this fact promises a much better
progress, we need an IIoT taxonomy that instead divides by
understood, better connected
fundamental characteristics.
future. It also has immense
economic benefit: over time, generic technologies offer huge advantage over special-purpose
approaches. Thus, to grow our understanding and realize the promise of the IIoT, we must
abandon our old industry-specific thinking.
3.
PROPOSED TAXONOMIC CRITERIA
So, what can we use for divisions? What defining characteristics can we use to separate the
Mammals from the Reptiles from the Insects of the IIoT?
There are far too many requirements, both functional and non-functional, to consider developing
a “comprehensive” set to use as criteria. As in animals, we need to find those few requirements
that divide the space into useful, major categories.
The task is simplified by the realization that the goal is to divide the space so we can determine
system architecture. Thus, good division criteria are a) unambiguous and b) impactful on the
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December 2015