IIoT as an Internal Subscription Service Benefiting the Many
This year’s challenge for the young IoT industry will come in clearly proving its ROI, according to Gartner Group. With millions of individuals now wearing a new hat as an IoT developer since 2015, the way all can show return is though minimizing the initial resources and cost of IoT implementation in the first place. The next is to make that data accessible for business teams to gain visibility of data relationships and deliver on the promise of IoT in savings and revenue. In the 90’s, MQTT, the prevailing unifying IoT transport, set out to achieve both.
In today’s scope of IIoT (Industrial Internet of Things), transporting data securely and dependably from the plant floor level or field level up can create a resource bottleneck. Most of the effort involves the Operational Tech team (OT), the team with the automation protocol know-how, in a close working model with IT, making data from multiple nodes previously only attached to a SCADA system now mutually readable.
IoT initiatives have a habit of starting from the perspective of the top. But as Arlen Nipper, co-inventor of Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT) had first envisioned when working with IBM, bringing operational data up to IT management works best if you build it from the plant floor level or field level up through the enterprise. It is the OT’s expertise that can tag that operational data to a new spec for business users, and route it to the right repository where multiple interested parties can get to it. A one-to-many relationship. |
IoT as an enabler for an internal data subscription service Model
The team’s inspiration for MQTT came from challenges in a project for a leading oil company to reduce latency in a synch of electronic flow measurement data to SCADA. Among the automation data, financial transaction data could also be derived. Operations needed their data subset of info from the flow computers, and accounting department needed their subset for their business applications. The impetus for MQTT was the requirements for the data transport, to bring operational data to new IT territory for the financials. IT worked with the OT data to create a publish-subscribe pattern for all the information to IT data repositories.
IoT Data Projects On the Fly
For the business side, the results of this OT/IT team convergence can be handled in an internal data subscription service for diverse data consumers. Accounting can see total balance on a system flow, for example, while operational control monitors flow variables.
A business data owner can have an idea, the analytics application layer allows that owner to spin-out a data subscription to a subset of data in ad hoc fashion and the data project starts.
With the agility of data subscription with today’s analytics applications, ideas about business data can be deployed rapidly and as-needed to see data relationships and experience new economies in process automation or manufacturing.
IoT data gets big really fast, but business queries in the enterprise often need only an average over time or insights into trends. The answer is to conduct some of the analytics task on IoT devices or gateways at the edge and send aggregated results to the central system.
Advantech offers an IoT Gateway Starter Kit with a fanless industrial-grade system that can handle these edge aggregation tasks. Employing MQTT for data transport, integrated server-side software and connectivity to the cloud, the IoT Gateway Starter Kit offers a jump starter for IoT designers and IT staff to rapidly develop an IoT solution on the facility floor. Learn more about the Advantech offers an IoT Gateway Starter Kit.
