- Introduction
Industry 4.0 and the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) has become one of the most talked about industrial business concepts in recent years. However, Industry 4.0 and the IIoT are often presented at a high level by consultants who are presenting from a business perspective to executive clients, which means the underlying technical complexity is irrelevant. Consultants focus on business models and operational efficiency, which is very attractive, where financial gains and new business models are readily understandable to their clients. Unfortunately, these presentations often impress and invigorate executives, who see the business benefits but fail to reveal to the client the technical abstraction of the lower-layer complexity that underpin the Industrial Internet.
In this book, we strive to address this failure and although we start with a high-level view of the potential gains of IIoT business incentives and models, and describe successful use-cases, we move forward to understand the technical issues required to build an IIoT network. The purpose is to provide business and technology participants with the information required in deploying and delivering an IIoT network.
Therefore, the structure of the book is that the initial chapters deal with new and innovative business models that arise from the IIoT as these are hugely attractive to business executives. Subsequent chapters address the underpinning technology that makes IIoT possible. As a result, we address the way we
can build real-world IIoT networks using a variety of technologies and protocols. However, technology and protocol convergence isn’t everything; sometimes we need a mediation service or platform to glue everything together.
So for that reason we discuss in the middle chapters protocols, software patterns, and middleware IIoT platforms and how they provide the glue or the looking glass that enables us to connect or visualize our IIoT network.
Finally, we move forward from generic IIoT concepts and principle to Industry 4.0, which relates to industry, and there we see a focus on manufacturing.
Industry 4.0 relates to industry in the context of manufacturing, so these chapters consider how we can transform industry and reindustrialize our nations.
- What Is the Industrial Internet?
To explain why businesses should adopt the Industrial Internet, we need to first consider what the IIoT actual is all about. The Industrial Internet provides a way to get better visibility and insight into the company’s operations and assets through integration of machine sensors, middleware, software, and backend cloud compute and storage systems. Therefore, it provides
method of transforming business operational processes by using as feedback the results gained from interrogating large data sets through advanced analytics. The business gains are achieved through operational efficiency gains and accelerated productivity, which results in reduced unplanned downtime and optimized efficiency, and thereby profits.
Although the technologies and techniques used in existing machine-to-machine ( M2M ) technologies in today's industrial environments may look similar to the IIoT, the scale of operation is vastly different. For example, with Big Data in IIoT systems, huge data streams can be analyzed online using cloud-hosted advanced analytics at wire speed. Additionally, vast quantities of data can be
stored in distributed cloud storage systems for future analytics performed in batch formats. These massive batch job analytics can glean information and statistics, from data that would never previously been possible because of the relatively tiny sampling pools or simply due to more powerful or refined algorithms. Process engineers can then use the results of the analytics to optimize
operations and provide the information that the executives can transform to knowledge, in order to boost productivity and efficiency and reduce operational costs.
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