Three Main Themes in the Industrial Internet of Things
We need to undertake a few essential tasks to enable Smart Maintenance and Operations. First,
we need to retrofit the existing assets or build new ones to enable connectivity, data collection
and remote management capabilities. Second, we need to establish asset management
applications that perform aggregate maintenance on a large number of assets. Furthermore, we
need to deploy streaming analytics and visualization capabilities to gain timely visibility to the
asset operations. The analytics will become more advanced, progressing from describing the
current operational states and conditions of the assets (providing visibility), to predicting how
they would likely evolve (providing prognostics) and ultimately to prescribing the actions
necessary for ensuring the desired operational outcomes (providing solutions). Finally, we need
to integrate these applications with the business systems, e.g. resource and logistics
management, work scheduling, customer relationship management and other domain-specific
business systems, to streamline business processes that are involved.
We also face a few important challenges. The first challenge is how to implement rigorous
security to thwart potential attacks against the enlarged attack surfaces of the assets now
exposed by the connectivity and additional system elements in the network. The second
challenge is how to add the new capabilities in a way without compromising the performance
and safety of existing operations. The third challenge is how to create an ecosystem in which data
sharing is incentivized so that different vendors of the assets are motivated to share data,
enabling a holistic view and maintenance of the complete system.
The Industrial Internet Reference Architecture (IIRA) provides a reasonable framework for
considering many of these concerns. It also describes some functional and implementation
models as a starting point to conceptualize a system architecture for this theme. Furthermore, a
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December 2015