A PoV on the IIC Industrial Internet Reference Architecture
Coverage of Intelligent Control – The IIRA brings out the control system aspects of IIS and the
complexities of such control systems in the face of uncertainty concerning inputs and the nondeterministic behavior of components. This is the first reference architecture that covers the
control system aspects of complex and distributed IIS.
5.2
Weaknesses of the IIRA
The major weakness of the IIRA at this point is that it is designed at a very high level of abstraction
and thus requires interpretation to apply its recommendations to the specific challenges unique
to each industry sector. The IIRA can form the basis for the development and review of more
detailed frameworks, such as the ETSI Functional Architecture, or guidelines, such as the Cloud
Security Alliance guidelines. While the IIRA, as a living document, continues to be refined to
provide the necessary depth, companies will need to create their own review checklists and
guidelines as an intermediate step for leveraging the IIRA to address their needs.
The lack of a domain and information model is yet another weakness. A domain and information
model as discussed in the IoT-A ARM forms the basis for creating data hubs around which
everything else would revolve. The Platform Tier in an IIS would be a key participant in any
dynamically composed orchestrated IIS service. A data hub maintained within the platform tier
provides the ability to serve ad hoc data requests and analytics. The domain model provides the
common shared ontology for such services and interfaces. It also provides a guideline for the
designers of such data hubs.
A lot of discussion in the IIRA concerns complex systems that are expected to be designed and
operated on a medium to long-term horizon. Large, complex system-of-system types of IIS that
are involved in some form of closed loop control system for business and mission critical
processes are still some distance away. Discussions concerning resilient and intelligent control
and dynamic interoperability is something to which most companies will not be able to relate.
Today, most industrial organizations are interested in IIS systems for better asset visibility,
utilization, efficiency of operations, reduction of energy and resource consumption, or the
prediction of failures and machine behavior to reduce asset downtimes. They are faced with the
substantial challenges of integrating of hundreds of types of legacy IT & OT systems, establishing
the ability to have a single common toolset for managing and monitoring diverse interconnected
assets and products. They need high performance, scalable and secure data ingestion
mechanisms. Most use cases today need descriptive analytics followed by integration into
existing enterprise IT systems. The need for sophisticated resilient control systems and
dynamically discovered interoperable services is still some distance away.
Industrial Internet and IoT is in flux. Many different industry alliances have been formed and are
working towards building connectivity protocols. These are in various stages of maturity and
adoption. Companies understand that there will not be one single standard or protocol for all use
cases and there will be a continuous evolution of technologies and standards. They need the
IIC Journal of Innovation
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