U6 Flashcards
(213 cards)
In general, IIoT primarily focuses on ?
business scenarios integrating vertically (i.e., from machines to cloud), horizontally (i.e., among supply networks), or along the life cycle of the product.
There exist some significant challenges that are unique to the IIoT architecture implementation, including:
(1) achieving productivity gains in terms of higher throughput and efficiency and eliminating non-value-adding activities;
(2) failure prevention and poor product quality;
and (3) flexible design through hiding complexity, low configuration, or reconfiguration effort, plug and produce, and avoiding technology gaps.
IIoT represents a special case of the general IoT reference architecture so that the operational technology (OT) layer and the IT layer in a manufacturing context can?
be easily integrated.
The IIoT reference architecture consists of three main layers:
edge, plant, and cloud/enterprise.
Before delving into the IIoT reference architecture, it is worth mentioning that the three-layer approach emerges from the need for ?
the individual factory to continue operation even if external connections to enterprise and cloud systems should fail.
In other words, stopping the production lines for an external connection failure is unacceptable.
In addition to IIoT, the three-layer approach is also common in other IoT scenarios such as:
smart buildings, where a local entity must continue operating smoothly even if connectivity to centralized IT systems fails.
The above figure demonstrates a scenario from automotive manufacturing for?
monitor production equipment and tools for various performance metrics.
In this scenario, analytics is to be performed both at the edge (applying the emerging edge analytics architecture) on?
edge devices and at the enterprise layer.
At the edge, the equipment associated with production operations is to be continuously monitored by ?
various sensors.
Examples of these equipment include :
production machines, smart devices, robots used for welding, and handling equipment, e.g., conveyors, palletizers.
Such devices and production machines are typically managed by SCADA systems, which can be integrated by industry protocols such as:
Profibus,
OPC,
and MODBUS.
Some newer equipment is embedding technology that allows it to?
communicate with the outside world through IT protocols such as MQTT.
The sensory data from intelligent devices and production machines can be communicated up through?
the layers with appropriate filtering and aggregation along the way.
As it can be seen above, gateways are typically utilized to integrate with?
the existing systems and equipment.
The gateways also become more capable of ?
running edge analytics,
applying rules,
and even storing data locally to support operations at the edge.
Accordingly, the edge completely handles an interaction with equipment with no involvement of?
the plant or enterprise layers.
In other scenarios, the sensory data may flow up from the edge through the plant or to the enterprise where?
plant and enterprise analytics is performed in a similar way.
To account for possible connection-failures, the edge and plant need to be able to ?
operate as a stand-alone unit from the enterprise,
therefore some capabilities of the platform need to be in both the plant and the enterprise.
In the automotive scenario, sensory data is collected from the equipment and tools initially by?
programmable controllers connected to the equipment through proprietary equipment interfaces.
The controllers can be configured to pass the sensory data to the?
upper layers of the architecture via standard IT protocols like MQTT.
Such data transfer can be performed periodically or ?
based on conditions.
The data can also be transformed into different formats as?
needed before it is passed on to the subsequent layer.
Edge Analytics is typically performed on?
the outbound information in the OT/IT hub.
Depending on the result of the Edge Analytics, command data is?
sent back down to the equipment.