Three Main Themes in the Industrial Internet of Things
Smart Maintenance and Operations focuses on optimizing maintenance and operations at the
asset level. Global Optimization delivers system-wide operational efficiency by holistically
analyzing operational data across fleets of assets to meet business objectives. Local Autonomy
further achieves operational efficiency by enabling assets to adapt intelligently to changing
operational context while increasing resilience in operations.
As the application of the industrial internet develops in these and other themes, we expect that
new possibilities and opportunities will emerge enabling new classes of applications, creating
new values and driving development of new technologies in a virtue cycle of advances.
2.
SMART MAINTENANCE AND OPERATIONS
Broadly speaking, industries at large have made hefty investments in the past decades building
up a vast scale of infrastructure for industrial operations (the brown field). This infrastructure
consists of a variety of assets, many of which operate at various levels of automation supported
by micro-controllers connected to sensors and actuators performing closed-loop control. Today
a large proportion of these assets still operate in isolation, some geographically distributed. The
first phase of many Industrial Internet deployments will likely seek to connect to these assets to
remotely monitor and maintain their operations. By doing so, we can gain timely visibility to the
operational states of the assets and an ability to manage them remotely to improve uptime and
reduce maintenance costs. This new monitoring capability allows us to remotely inspect the asset
operations on demand and to be alerted to anomalies and exceptions in the operations. The new
maintenance capability enables us to provision, configure, update, diagnose and repair the assets
remotely. Moreover, data from the operational state of the assets can be analyzed to enable
advanced capabilities such as predictive and prognostic maintenance to prevent unplanned
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December 2015