M2M, Industry 4.0, Industrial Internet, By Whatever Name, It’s Transforming Automation On Grand Scale

Internet Of People + Internet Of Things With IP Addresses

Experienced, perhaps “jaded”, battle scarred veterans of industrial manufacturing hear it all the time: a new technology is on the horizon that will change your life for the better, make you rich, lead to your promotion and make you the envy of your co-workers and competitors. Veterans know what these code words really mean: “we have another product we’d like to sell you so we can make our sales targets.”

But veterans are also old and experienced enough to know they have climbed similar cultural and technical barriers in the past, when they had to as a matter of survival, and so their ears begin to perk up; they remember what it was like the last time to be behind the curve.

Where are you on the curve?

HypeCyclePhase (Image Courtesy www.zenseesaa.net)

A Communications Revolution

As we have reported before, industrial control and factory automation will increasingly be influenced by the Internet of Things (IoT) in coming years. Traditionally engineering has been mostly about “things” but now it is about integration of all of the factors of production: engineering, manufacturing, logistics and life-cycles into a symbiotic whole. If engineers are not seeing the big picture they are “missing the forest for the trees.”

Bring Intelligence To Machines

Slowly but surely new technologies and platforms have developed over decades that integrate information from SCADA, HMI, MES and EMI systems into a holistic fabric. In a manufacturing setting anything and everything in the plant, including its management systems and subsystems, can easily be integrated into an internet like network so that everything participates in improving manufacturing and business processes and outcomes.

Internet of Things (Image Courtesy www.sriconsulting.com)

Merging Information & Industrial Spheres

The typical platform for connecting people, processes, data and things is to build a secure, enterprise wide network using Ethernet and Internet protocols.

The number of business models for the Internet of things, new case studies, opportunities and challenges as well as the development of state-of-the-art hardware platforms is allowing new IoT technology to come online.

Industries of all kinds: consumer services, smart homes, EVs and automobiles, transit systems, healthcare, smart energy, energy grids, logistics, supply chains, oil, gas, manufacturing and industrial are transforming.

A huge new market is opening up for ID and sensor systems such as proprietary and standardize RFID, active RFID, Real Time Location Systems and Mesh Sensor Networks. These are enabled by asset monitoring and tracking software which discretely monitor assets and devices across a wide range of factory processes.

Nothing in the IoT is more important than security and in a future post, we will examine the treat of cyberattacks on these new systems.

This entry was posted on July 2nd, 2014 and is filed under Automation. Both comments and pings are currently closed.