Industrial Internet Use-Cases

The potential for the Industrial Internet is vast with opportunities spread over wide areas of productivity, such as logistics, aviation, transportation, healthcare, energy production, oil and gas production, and manufacturing. As a result, many use-cases will make industry executives wake up and consider the possibilities of the IIoT. After all, industry only requires a minimal shift in productivity to deliver huge revenue, an example is that even an increase of 1% of productivity can produce huge revenue benefits such as aviation fuel savings. In order to realize these potential profits, industry has to adopt and adjust to the Industrial Internet of Things. However, spotting, identifying, and then strategically targeting the opportunities of the IIoT is not quite as easy as it might seem. It is important, therefore, to create use-cases that are appropriate to vertical businesses. For instance, the requirements of manufacturing differ from logistics, which also differs to healthcare. Similarly, the innovation, expertise, and financial budget available to deliver specific industry applications will have many diverse constraints. For example, healthcare will consume vast amounts of expenditure with little or no financial return; in contrast, the oil and gas industry will also require immense operational and capital cost but will likely deliver huge profits. Similarly, logistics—which is very reliant on supply chain, product tracking, and transportation—will have different operational requirements. However, what the IIoT offers is a potential solution for all vertical industries, by utilizing the advances in sensor technology, wireless communications, networking, cloud computing, and Big Data analysis. Businesses can, regardless of their size and discipline, leverage these technologies in order to reap the rewards of the IIoT. To illustrate the potential benefits and advantages to individual industrial dis- ciplines, consider the following use-cases.

• Healthcare 

In this example, we will strive to explain how utilizing IIoT technology can unlock and deliver value to the heath care industry. In healthcare, and it wasn’t so long ago, doctors made house visits to those too sick or incapacitated through injury to make their way to the doctor’s office. However, this was time consuming and costly. Consequently, doctors restricted home visits to only those who in the doctor’s experience deemed sufficiently seriously inca- pacitated through illness or injury, and everyone else had to turn up and take their place in the doctor’s office queue. This policy, though understandable, was seriously inconvenient for both patients and doctors, especially patients in rural areas who might have to drive considerable distances while suffering from the debilitating effects of illness or physical injury. Therefore, an alterna- tive arrangement was always desirable. That is why Guy’s and St. Thomas’s Nation Health Service Foundation Trust in the UK are piloting the use of smartphones to use as health monitors. The patient’s kit compromises a smartphone, scales, blood oxygen sensors, and a blood pressure cuff. The idea is that the patients will take daily readings of their weight, heart rate, blood pressure, and oxygen levels, then upload the data to the smartphone via Bluetooth to be sent to BT’s telehealth service. Nurses at the service then analyze the data. If there are any abnormalities in the data, the nurses will discuss issues with the patients. By using these homecare kits, patients have more control over their own condition and can manage their own chronic medical conditions in their own homes. It is hoped that the pilot project, which is being tested on 50 heart failure patients, will ultimately save lives. Another example, of a state-of-the-art IIoT project in today’s healthcare envi- ronment is the initiative adopted by Scottish health chiefs to provide a means of automation, supervision, and communication for remote outpatients. The robot—known as the Giraff —is being used in the homes of patients, particularly those suffering from dementia in the Western Isles and Shetland to allow them to continue living independently. The robots are designed to provide reassurance to friends and family, by enabling a relative or carer to call up the Giraff from a remote computer or smartphone from any location. The 3G audio/video channel displays the carer’s face on the Giraff's video screen, allowing them to chat to the patient via a Skype-like video call. The Giraff launched in 2013 as a pilot trial. The Giraff robots are just under five feet tall with wheels, and a video screen instead of a head. They are fit- ted with high-definition cameras to monitor the home and provide remote surveillance. The Giraff allows relatives and carers to keep a vigilant eye on the patients, to ensure they are taking their medication and eating meals, while also providing a method for social exchange potentially from hundreds of miles away. The carer can also manipulate the robot and drive the robot around the house to check for any health or safety issues. The use of assistive technology is sometimes targeted at specific patients, and, as such, the Giraff would have a specific rather than a generic applica- tion. It was initially feared that older patients suffering from dementia would react badly to the presence of a robot. On the contrary, it appears that they found the robot good company, even though it could not hold a conversation (although the likes of Siri could address that immediate problem and neither can a dog or cat). Furthermore, earlier trials in Australia showed that people with dementia were not afraid of the machines. They hope the robots will help people living alone in remote areas to feel less lonely. Another personal healthcare robot is Baymax , which is a robot with a soft synthetic skin that can detect medical conditions (this was an initiative based on a fictional Disney character in Big Hero 6 but it may not be far from becom- ing reality). Early versions of a robot teddy bear, developed by MIT Media Lab, are now being put through their paces in a children’s hospital in the United States. An updated version of the bear has been fitted with pressure sensors on two of its paws and several touch sensors throughout its body parts. The screen of the smartphone device in the robot’s head shows animated eyes. The robot can use the phone’s internal speaker, microphone, and camera for sensing changes in a child’s well-being.

• Oil and Gas Industry

The Oil and Gas industry depends on the development of high technology as well as scientific intelligence in the quest for discovery of new reservoirs. The exploration and development of newly discovered oil and gas resources requires modern sensors, analytics, and feedback control systems that have enhanced connectivity, monitoring, control, and automation processes. Furthermore, the oil and gas industry obtains for process vast quantities of data with relation to the status of drilling tools and the condition of machin- ery and processes across an entire field-installation. Previously, technology targeted oil and gas production but geologists had lim- ited ability to process the vast amounts of data produced by a drilling rig, as there was just so much of it and storage was expensive and just not feasible. Indeed, such was the vast amount of data collected, up to 90% would be dis- carded, as there was nowhere to store the data let alone have the computa- tional power to analyze it in a timely manner. However, the Industrial Internet of Things, (IIoT) has changed that wasteful practice and now drilling rigs and research stations can send back the vast quantities of raw data retrieved from drilling and production sensors for stor- age and subsequent analysis in the cloud. For example, drilling and exploration used to be expensive and unpredictable as it was based on geologist's analysis of the mapping of the sea floor. This proved to be unpredictable and, as a result, major oil and gas exploration and producers are transforming their infra- structures to take advantage of the new technologies that drive the Industrial Internet. These technological advances , such as high bandwidth communica- tions, wireless sensor technology, cloud data storage with advanced analytical tools, and advanced intelligent networks are enabling systems that enhance the predictability of field research, make research more predictable, reduce exploration costs, and also eventually lower field operation expenses. New industry regulations for well monitoring and reservoir management have, on top of other technical demands, pushed field operators to find effi- cient ways of addressing existing operational constraints. For example, in the 1990s and 2000s, it was commonplace for field operators to dump almost all of the data they collected during drilling due to a lack of processing and communication capabilities; the amount of data was just too vast to accom- modate. In mitigation, most of the data was only relevant to the time it was generated—for example, the temperature of the drill bit, or the revolutions per second—so was only useful at that specific time. However, with the advances in technology, specifically in down-hole sensors and the subsequent massive influx of data from down-hole drilling tools, which required advanced analysis in both real-time data streaming as well as his- torical and predictive analysis, demands for more innovative solutions have increased. Fortunately, just as the demand has grown for such vast data analytics within the oil and gas industry, another technology has come to the fore that provides the necessary compute, data storage, and the industrial scalability to deliver real-time data analysis. Additionally cloud technology is able of batch process- ing Big Data mining, for historical understanding and predictive forecasting. Cloud computing and the Industrial Internet now provide the technology to make gathering, storing, and analyzing vast quantities of data economically feasible. However, the advent of the Industrial Internet has delivered far more than economic and scalable cloud services in compute, storage, and data analytics; it has changed industry profoundly. For example, industry now has the ability through interconnectivity to connect intelligent objects—machines, devices, sensors, actuators, and even people—into collaborating networks, an Internet of Things. At the same time, the designers of these intelligent, smart things have built in self-diagnosis and self-configuration, which greatly enhances reli- ability and usability. In addition, device connectivity, the requirement for cables and power, which was once a real problem, has been alleviated by wireless communication. New wireless technologies and protocols , along with low power technologies and component miniaturization, enable sensors to be located anywhere, regardless of size, inaccessibility, or cabling restrictions. Connectivity is at the core of the Industrial Internet; after all, it requires com- munications over the Internet and interaction with the cloud. Therefore, the communication protocols are all important and this has produced new pro- tocols such as 6LoWLAN and CoAP , which we will discuss in subsequent chapters at a technical level later. These may work well for some industrial use-cases that have low capability devices deployed in end-to-end connectivity. However, for all systems there are only two ways to detect a remote node’s status —the sensor sends data back to the controller, for example as an event or the controller polls the node at programmable intervals to obtain the nodes status. Both of these are inefficient, but there is a better way (discussed in detail later), which is the publish/subscribe software pattern. It’s a preferable technique as it can instantly inform a subscriber across a common software bus of a change if that subscriber has noted an interest. This is preferable to the subscriber polling the publisher for any updates, as it is far more efficient and quicker. However, not all publish/subscribe models work in the same man- ner. MQPP and XMPP are very popular as they are well supported; however, they do not support real-time operations, so are not well suited to industrial scenarios. The data distribution system does support real time operation and it is capa- ble of delivering data at physical speeds to thousands of recipients, simultane- ously, with strict control on timing, reliability, and OS translation. These are hugely important qualities when deployed in an industrial environment, such as the oil and gas industry. It is these new IoT protocols and technologies that have provided the means to change oil and gas exploration and field production beyond what was previ- ously feasible. As an example of how the oil and gas industry utilizes DDS as a publish/ subscribe protocol, let’s examine how they have integrated it into their opera- tional processes. The first example shows how IoT has enabled remote operations of drilling rigs by automation . This is not only cost effective at a time when field experts are becoming a rarity, but also beneficial with regard to field efficiency, safety, and well quality. It can also lead to—via advanced sensor technology being self diagnostic and self-configurable—a significant decrease in downtime and equipment failures. Figure 2-1 shows a block illustration of an automated remote control topol- ogy , whereby a high-speed DDS data bus connects all the sensors and actua- tors with a process controller, which automates the process of drilling and completion. n addition to automation , the design also facilitates the remote collection and analysis of operational data, equipment health, process activity, and real-time streaming of equipment log data. The high-speed connectivity provided by either wireless or fiber optic cables connects the field well with the remote control station and ultimately with the enterprise systems. Data collected from the field station, via the DDS bus , can be stored for future historical and predictive analysis. This will allow on- shore analysts and process planners to adjust and control the well operations by sending corrective feedback to the well systems. Another opportunity that the IIoT delivers is that of enabling massive data collection and subsequent analysis . Prior to the advances and public access to the vast resources in cloud computing, it just was not feasible or economical for even cash rich oil and gas companies to hoard vast quantities of data. After all, the amount of data generated by an operational drilling or production oil well can be vast. However, now that has changed with the Industrial Internet technologies being able to accommodate both the storage and the compute. power to analyze these vast data sets. A typical use for such technology would be in intelligent well monitoring, whereby entire fields of sensors are monitored and the data accumulated to provide data to a remote control center for historical and predictive analysis. Furthermore, an additional use-case for the oil and gas industry of IIoT is in the deployment of intelligent real-time reservoir management . In order to benefit from analytics, whether they are historical or predictive, all the sys- tems within the ecosystem must be connected and contribute to the pool of data. The larger the pool of data, the more reliable the results of algorithms will be, as it can mitigate the risk of irregular data patterns that do not neces- sarily reflect the true nature of the process. For a simplistic example, consider tossing a coin ten times and then ten million times when considering the probability of heads or tails. This, connectivity of systems is even more impor- tant when dealing with real-time analytics on streaming data, where real-time analysis and feedback is required. However, the topology of large-scale analytical networks is not trivial, with systems interfaced and data driven via a data bus to the cloud or to streaming analytical tools. With DDS, a designer can decouple the complexity of the physical connections among computers, machines, systems, and sites by provision of a single logical data bus. Finally, a last use-case example shows how deploying IIoT protocols and tech- nology can ease the production and deployment of industrial platforms as it decouples software from the operating system, thereby making application development more agile, quicker, and cheaper. The real potential of the IIoT is to create new, intelligent ways of working, through automation, intelligent machines, and advanced analytics. In the oil and gas industry, IIoT methods and technologies are already being adopted to reduce costs and increase efficiency, safety, and ultimately profits. However, the future of the IIoT must integrate with the cloud, which then has the potential to merge local applications into larger regional or global systems, to become a network of systems that deliver the full potential of Big Data analytics to industry.

• Smart Office

Buildings are critical systems, and they are responsible for approximately 40% of the total EU energy consumption. What is worse is that buildings are also to blame for 36% of green house gas emissions . However, controlling or reducing these figures is not easy. Even with a three-pronged strategy, such as improving building insulation and energy efficiency and providing better building control systems, progress has been painfully slow. Typically, this is due to the results of several conditions. The first of these strategies—improving insulation—is a major cost saving incentive for any building as it reduced heating or cooling costs to the inhabitants. Furthermore, it reduces energy costs and reduces CO2 emissions and is easy to implement into the design and installation of new buildings, but very expensive and difficult to deploy into existing buildings. The reason for this is that most older buildings were simply not designed to be energy efficient. The second strategy for improving the building’s energy efficiency , for example, by changing light bulbs and strip lighting for LED lights, is gaining some traction but is still under exploited. This may be due to a failure to get the mes sage across to property owners and businesses. However, the third strategy, improving building management through automation control systems, can provide the potential to improve building energy efficiency and reduce green house emissions. Unfortunately, like installing insulation into existing buildings, especially older ones, deploying a building control management system is a painful task, both in financial costs and in business disruption. Previously, installing sensors and actuators (such as on radiators or on AC units) required major refit work. However, with the recent advances in technology and the IoT in particular, sensors and actuators are now “smart” and can use wireless communications, which greatly reduces the disruption and much of the cost. The integration and development of sensors, devices, and protocols based on the IoT are important enablers of applications, for both industries and the general population, by helping to make smart buildings a reality. IoT technology allows for the interaction between smart things and the real world, providing a method for harvesting data from the analogue world and producing information and knowledge in the digital world. For example, a smartphone has built-in sensing and communication capabilities, such as sensors for acceleration, location, along with communication pro- tocols that support Wi-Fi, SMS, and cellular. They also have NFC (near field communication ) and RFID (radio frequency identification ), both of which can be used for identification. Consequently, the smartphone provides the means to capture data and communicate information. Also, the ubiquity and user acceptance of the smartphone makes them an ideal HMI (human machine interface ) for smart buildings, where users need to control their own envi- ronmental conditions. Nevertheless, the IoT comes with its own set of problems, such as the man- agement of huge amount of data provided in real time by a large number of IoT devices deployed throughout the building. Additionally, there is the problem related to the interoperability of devices, and furthermore the inte- gration of many proprietary protocols and communication standards that coexist in the marketplace. The protocols that are applicable to buildings (such as heating, cooling, and air conditioning machines) may not be available on devices presently available off-the-shelf. This needs addressing before wide-scale adoption is achievable. One of the main problems with installing traditional building management systems (BMS) into existing and especially older buildings is that the traditional methods are often based on specialized protocols, which we will discuss later, such as BACnet, KNX, and LON. In addition, the alternative WSN (wireless sensor networks ) solutions are based on specific protocol stacks typically used in building control systems, such as ZigBee, Z-Wave, or EnOcean. The deployment is much easier than with the BACnet wired bus, but they still have issues with integration into other systems. To this end, in 2014, IoT6 (a European Union working group) set up a testbed for a smart office to research the potential of IPv6 and related standards in support of a conceptual IIoT design. The aims were to research and test IPv6 to see whether it could alleviate many of the interconnectivity and fragmenta- tion that currently bedevils IoT implementation projects. The methods the IOT6 group decided on was to build a test office using standard off-the-shelf sensors, devices, and protocols. IPv6 was preferable but not always an option due to lack of availability. The devices were connected via a service-orientated architecture (SOA) to provide Internet services, interoperability, cloud inte- gration, mobility, and intelligence distribution. The original concept of the IOT6 Smart Office was to investigate the potential of IPv6 as a common protocol, which could provide the necessary integration required between people and information services, including the Internet and cloud-based services, the building, and the building systems. The IOT6 team hoped to demonstrate that by better control of traditional building automation techniques, they could reduce energy consumption by at least 25%. In addition, they hoped to ease the deployment and integration of building automation systems, something that is typically costly and requires refits and expensive installation. They also looked to improve the management of access control and security by utilizing smartphones as an HMI .
With regard to the integration of people and the building information services, the testbed would provide a location, a smart office that was fully equipped and operational. It would provide a meeting and conference rooms, and they would also provide for innovative interfaces within the building (virtual assis- tant, etc.) that would enable users to interface with their environment and customize the actions of sensors controlling things like the temperature, lights, and blinds. Furthermore, the office would have full information and services, such as computers for Internet access and displays to provide real-time infor- mation on the state of the world. In addition, the smart office would provide a professional coffee machine—a machine that provides hot water 24/7.

One of the goals of the IOT6 testbed was to provide a platform for testing and validating the interoperability among the various of-the-shelf sensors and protocols and the conceptual architecture of the Industrial Internet of Things. They were determined to interconnect and test wherever possible multi- protocol interoperability with real devices through all the possible different couplings of protocols (among the selected standards). Also, they wanted to test and demonstrate various innovative Internet-based application scenarios related to the Internet of Things, including business processes related scenarios. In addition, they planned to test and demonstrate the potential of the multi-protocol card, IPv6 proxy’s for non-IP devices, and estimate the potential scalability of the system. Furthermore, they would deploy and validate the system in a real testbed environment with real end users in order to test the various scenarios. The four scenarios tested were:

 • The first scenario involved the building maintenance process, which is the process of integrating IPv6 with standard IoT building control devices, mobile phones, cloud services, and building management applications. • The second scenario addressed user comfort in the smart office and this is really where the office does become intelligent or “smart”. In this scenario, a user is identi- fied by his mobile phones, NFC, or RFID, and the control management system will adjust the environment to the user’s pre-set or machine learned preferences, such as temperature or light levels that provide the user with a welcoming ambience. When a visitor arrives, detected again by RFID on their mobile phone, the CMS can turn on the lights in the reception area and play music and video, again to provide a welcoming atmosphere. When the last person leaves the smart office, detected by pres- ence detectors, the CMS will turn off the lights and reduce the HVAC to the standby condition.

• The third scenario related to energy saving and aware- ness. In this scenario, the intention was to demonstrate the use of IPv6, with a focus on energy management and user awareness. The intention was to allow a user, when entering an office, to adjust the environment using their mobile phone app. The mobile app will display current settings and when the user selects to change the set- ting the mobile app will display the energy consumption implications of such modifications. Once the user leaves the room, the system returns the settings to the most economical energy configuration. • The fourth scenario entailed safety and security and focused on intrusion detection and fire-detection. In this scenario, the system learns of a security issue due to pres- ence detectors, which notify the system of someone being in a room that is supposedly empty, or magnetic switches on windows or doors trigger the alarm. Similarly, tempera- ture sensors or smoke detectors can trigger fire-detectors. In both cases, the system looks up the IP addresses of the closest security server and possible backups. The system contacts the local data server by sending the data by any- cast with QoS and priority routing. If it does not receive a reply, it sends duplicate data to another group of security servers. The system also contacts the closest duty security agent, who can then access the location via remote video using their mobile phone app. The IOT6 group discovered through their technical analysis of the Smart Office that there were many significant improvements when deploying a building control management system using IoT devices based on an IPv6 - aware protocols such as 6LoWPAN and CoAP on a native IPv6 network (discusses later in the technical chapters). They reported improvements in ease of deployment, scalability, flexibility/modularity, security, reliability, and the total cost of deployment. The technical reports key performance indicators focused on energy savings and improvements in energy efficiency.
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References
http://www.giraffplus.eu/
https://www.rti.com/whitepapers/5_Ways_Oil_Gas.pdf
http://www.dhl.com/en/about_us/logistics_insights/dhl_trend_
research/Internet_of_things.html#.Vxbz49R94rg
iot6.eu/sites/default/files/IoT6%20-%20D7.3.pdf