Next-gen IIoT key for organizations and enterprises

IIoT will serve as the backbone for all the niche and latest technologies such as Big Data, Blockchain, AI, ML, DL, robotics, et al. Ramachandram Vedula, Enterprise Architect, along with Avanindra Jha and Tarun Atri, tells us more. Excerpts:

DQ: What business needs can be solved with the Industrial Internet of Things?

Ramachandram Vedula & Avanindra Jha: There are many business needs that can be solved by deploying IIoT.

Business-model innovation: Smart data collected by machines equipped with IIoT sensors can both support decision making and trigger actions. Additionally, it could be monetized. For example, an organization that services assets could offer predictive maintenance as an additional paid service.

Customer/user experience: IIoT can help to make products and services more attractive to both customers and internal users. For example, it can be easier for warehouse staff to find sensor-instrumented parts using indoor navigation. Similarly, smart products can determine when their service due dates are coming up or when they need maintenance checks, potentially preventing breakdowns. And data generated by smart products after the sale can be used to improve service.

Operational excellence: Sensors and actuators can monitor manufacturing processes and products, enabling real-time control of the production system. In supply chain operations, sensors and IIoT devices can track and trace products, while maintaining the requisite parameters during transit.

Environmental causes: IIoT can help monitor the environment, trigger alerts and even control hazardous situations and operations.

Worker health and safety: Factories are generally danger prone due to the machines and operational conditions that require extremely careful handling. To help manage the risk proactively, sensors can be used to monitor workplace environments and measure workers’ vitals, including heart rate, fatigue and stress. Also, by identifying an employee’s location, these sensors can help detect risks and identify issues in the work environment.

Strategy & new business avenues: The data driven insights would help leadership in strategizing, find new business avenues and also for new product ideas that help businesses grow. The insights from end user usage patterns, complaints received, continuous monitoring etc. will help build robust customer oriented strategies.

DQ: How big is the market for Industrial Internet of Things?

Ramachandram Vedula & Avanindra Jha: The Industrial IoT market size is anticipated to reach USD 91.4 billion by 2023 from an estimation of USD 64.0 billion out of 2018, at a CAGR of 7.4%. The Industrial IoT market in Asia Pacific is relied upon to develop at the most elevated pace of 8.9% during this time frame.

Almost every industry now needs real time data, data based insights, predictions and technology driven data points for decision making. IIoT provides such data, and would serve as the backbone for all the niche and latest technologies such as Big Data, Blockchain, AI, ML, DL, robotics, et al.

Since IIoT comprises multiple components such as sensors, network, platform, applications etc., the data ingested, monitored and analyzed is useful in all walks of life – be it industrial, consumer, environmental or day to day life. This drives the point that IIoT can impact life in almost every way because of its ubiquitous nature.

DQ: How are Industrial Internet of Things and 5G linked?

Ramachandram Vedula & Avanindra Jha: To explore the opportunities of 5G, organizations will require Industrial IoT networking tools that could be developed to the 5G availability range to cover specific use cases.

Companies will likewise need to handle scale. Overseeing thousands or millions of devices will require automation with zero-touch facility, and an integrated control to improve network management. In this manner, next gen IIoT will be a requirement for organizations and enterprises.

More and more, industrial enterprises are digitizing themselves to improve productivity, decrease costs, and maximize profits. These will require a profound comprehension for both the advances. The capabilities of 5G such as speed, edge computing, compute, storage and size would in a way make it synonymous with IIoT

DQ: How are Industrial Internet of Things and cloud computing linked?

Ramachandram Vedula & Avanindra Jha: IIoT provides us with data, lots of it – data streams to be precise. This huge data needs to be ingested, processed and stored as necessary

Cloud, with its main advantage of storage, processing capabilities and the pay-per-use models thus is a natural component in the IIoT framework. This allows organizations to plan, use and pass-on the benefits of IIoT to the end users.

Enterprise- and industrial-focused businesses have many telecom and IT related decisions to make about ICT infrastructure and services. Two of the most significant areas are cloud computing and Internet of Things (IoT). Mobile edge computing specifically is expected to turn into a significant area for enterprise computing infrastructure.

While both computing and IIoT require extensive planning and investment, the results are substantial for organizations that make the correct choices about bringing together new innovations with existing frameworks and procedures.

The return on investment keeps on reducing, but new and upgraded items and administrations, as well as improved client closeness are unmistakably the more drawn out long term benefits. This has revealed critical opportunities for enterprises to use developing arrangements including edge computing.

Actually, we see Industrial IoT (IIoT) arrangements including streaming data and analytics as a key value included capacity for some industry verticals including human services, assembling, and transportation.

DQ: How will IIoT benefit smart manufacturing?

Ramachandram Vedula & Avanindra Jha: There are many ways.

Reduced asset downtime - IIoT can ensure the organization against such disasters by promptly recognizing decrease in resource effectiveness, along these lines gauging the potential issues.

Better quality - It can help to distinguish quality issues at the start and furthermore furnish them with bits of knowledge to improve the quality of existing products.

Supply chain management - IIoT in manufacturing can assist your business with supply chain management by observing items and materials as they travel through the supply chain. IIoT can likewise be utilized to interface fabricating plants to the individual suppliers, keeping everybody in agreement with regards to following interdependencies and assembling process durations. This can help organizations to diminish stock and furthermore decrease capital prerequisites.

Increased energy efficiency - Empowers processing plants to increase granular insights into energy utilization and resource proficiency. This can assist managers with identifying failure in meeting the expected level of resources and perceive opportunities for energy cost savings.

DQ: How does 5G-TSN integration meets networking requirements for industrial automation? More sensors and computing power than ever before are attached to production equipment, so connectivity becomes a vital challenge.

Ramachandram Vedula & Tarun Atri: Traditional architecture approaches rarely have connectivity concepts at the heart of production and logistics equipment. Therefore dealing with increasing data volumes, growing demand for low latency reaction times and tighter integration into data centre applications becomes more and more difficult. This is where and how 5G helps.

5G will enable billions of new connections with speed and security as it offers a greater speed in the transmissions, a lower latency and therefore greater capacity of remote execution, a greater number of connected devices and the possibility of implementing virtual networks (network slicing), providing more adjusted connectivity to concrete needs.

DQ: How important is Time-Sensitive Networking for industrial automation?

Ramachandram Vedula & Tarun Atri: Ultimately, the eventual fate of industrial automation and control frameworks is about the reconciliation of data and web advances that keep on fulfilling necessities for high accessibility and continuous correspondences, and furthermore underpins the improvement of new items and inventive arrangements dependent on the optimal balancing of expenses and advantages.

More precisely, the unified network infrastructure of the future also requires deterministic communication capabilities that can ensure performance and QoS as well as, or better than, the purpose-built protocols that isolate our current islands of automation today. This is where TSN comes in.

Time-sensitive networking (TSN) is set to reshape the industrial communication landscape and lay the foundation for the convergence of Information Technology (IT) and Industrial Operations Technology (OT). By bringing industrial-grade robustness and reliability to Ethernet, TSN offers an IEEE standard communication technology that enables interoperability between standard-conformant industrial devices from any vendor.

TSN also removes the need for physical separation of critical and non-critical communication networks, thus allowing open data exchange between operations and enterprise —a concept at the heart of the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT).

DQ: How are IIoT platforms beginning to replace MES and related applications?

Ramachandram Vedula & Tarun Atri: The issue is that most MES frameworks were structured in the past – in almost all cases pre-IoT. These frameworks were never intended to incorporate information from the huge number of sensors on the plant floor. Nor were they structured in view of information accumulation standards. They were likewise never intended to total information continuously or store that information effectively for extensive stretches. Thus, MES frameworks oblige the capacity to see a plants activity comprehensively and make a move.

Information is in siloes and regularly just not caught by any stretch of the imagination. We lose significant bits of knowledge day by day and hourly. For one thing, many of the functions that MES performs today cannot be replaced by these new IoT platforms, even with analytics and apps. In addition, IoT and big data systems can produce unprecedented improvements in many areas but need MES to leverage their true potential and benefits.

As has been the situation for a long time, the passing of MES is significantly misrepresented. MES is really critical in these IIoT conditions. There is a characteristic fit where MES gives arrangements to guarantee that the IIoT edge knowledge improves as opposed to sub-streamlines business execution. MES ensures that IIoT data is in a context that allows people to make sound operational and business decisions.

DQ: What are the key differences between SCADA and IIoT? How can they overcome?

Ramachandram Vedula & Tarun Atri: There are many.

Challenges with SCADA:

Architecture
• SCADA has a poll based architecture which limits real time analytics and data science
• Low resolution polling approach misses insightful events
• Designed to take advantage of bandwidth (wired) but not storage or computing
• Today: storage and compute have become less expensive while bandwidth has become a major limitation

Integration
• Integration is challenging: hardware+communication+historian+software
• Data is locked in SCADA systems or field servers creating individual data siloes
• Consolidated one view solution is complex to achieve

Cost
• High capex
• High maintenance costs
• High replacement costs
• Total cost of ownership limits the application to high value wells

Security
• Data is not encrypted; interaction with other systems or integration with AI engine posses security concern
• Sniff-able clear text transmission
• Storage not encrypted
• Air gaps.

How IoT overcomes:
As is state:
• Assets with different kinds of PLCs and RTUs that support different connectivity protocols.
• Multiple SCADA systems from different vendors, each controlling a specific line or a set of lines. Machine data is available but there are data islands. SCADA systems also store a finite amount of data so historical data is not preserved for deeper analytics.
• Legacy assets that are not connected as they lack the right kind of instrumentation.
•Assets like Energy Meters that have never been connected due to cost overheads. Yet the information that they give out is vital.
• SCADA/Historian data architecture limit AI/ML/IoT application
• Unsecure

To be state with IoT:
• Greater visibility and control across all assets
• Intuitive alerts for anomalies
• Optimization & parameter changes possible at the platform
• Key KPIs tracked at the platform
• Allows AI/ML/IoT application
• One consolidated view across all sources
• Can be applied to legacy assets at much lower costs with faster ROI
• Centrally managed through cloud
• Fully secure

DQ: How can Li-Fi enable IIoT for the oil and gas industry, others?

Ramachandram Vedula & Tarun Atri: There are weaknesses for each innovation and this is the same with Li-Fi innovation. It is said that a Li-Fi gadget won't have the option to get signals during bright sunshine. Furthermore, that the sign can likewise be effectively hindered by any physical item, similar to dividers. These are some essential constraints of the Li-Fi innovation that can frequently lead to more concerning issues. Be that as it may, there are arrangements present also.

For example, Li-Fi could be utilized in conjunction with WiFi to guarantee a smooth data transfer. It is said that at present, the Li-Fi can't make up as a "substitute" for WiFi, however research is being led to make it progressively compelling.

The confinements can likewise be countered by utilizing keen engineering innovations which will manage the light to pursue the client. Further algorithms are being developed that will determine the light spectrum and will provide efficient data transfer. There are a few favorable circumstances of utilizing light waves rather than radio waves to transmit information especially in the O & G industry. A portion of these include: higher data transfer capacity, quicker transmission speeds, and the capacity to work in zones that are helpless to electromagnetic obstruction, similar to clinics and inside planes.

Some other potential physical places that could profit by Li-Fi include control plants, petrochemical production lines, and different regions Wi-Fi can't normally reach. Additionally, since light can be coordinated to any place it's simpler to keep away from impedance issues with Li-Fi. Additionally testing and maintaining of gas wells can be performed with greater ease and efficiency. This can be obtained by placing the Li-Fi transmitter at the bottom of the well and the receiver at the surface, for real-time continuous monitoring. Usage of radio waves can sometimes lead to hazards in petroleum and chemical industries, Li-Fi can be a wiser option here as well.