IIC Business Strategy and Solution Lifecycle
Figure 12: Metrics Library and its Usages
As mentioned before, these metrics and indicators will be key to establishing contracts and
responsibilities in largely distributed systems under fragmented ownership and governance.
The evolution toward an IIoT value network - as opposed to linear value chains - means that a
particular station or agent in the IIoT value network will have responsibilities to several others
thus getting closer to operating in a service mode for various consuming parties. For example,
asset tracking in a manufacturing plant will not just deliver tracking data to the production
manager, but will become a service used by other business units or departments, such as
shipping/receiving, equipment maintenance or even the quality assurance department.
It is clearly of importance that a common set of metrics be used across IIoT systems – or at least
a common way to define metrics (common templates, terminology and models, as illustrated in
Figure 12). Customers and users will expect to find similar well-established definitions across
SLAs. Experts and regulators will want stable and well-understood definitions of system
characteristics such as security, privacy or safety. Tools vendors and system administrators will
want to implement similar monitoring indicators and technologies across IIoT solutions.
It is the role of the IIC BSSL WG to help define (or select) methodologies about such metrics to
include what are typical metrics that make sense for a wide array of IIoT systems, what is a
common representation for them, how to use them as system requirements, in SLAs, and how
to implement their monitoring.
IIC Journal of Innovation
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