IoT for All

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With each passing year the IoT (Internet of Things) becomes more familiar, more of a household word. What once seemed a futuristic dream—having billions of devices connected and chattering over the Internet—is now almost taken for granted. Case in point is the IoT For All website whose very name speaks volumes. It seems that everyone is using or at least touched by IoT in one way or another.

At the beginning of the year, IoT For All published an article Where Is IoT Headed in 2019? that collects and distills the thoughts of industry experts regarding the near future for the IoT. Although not specific to Industrial IoT, there was significant discussion on several themes that are of interest to us here at Skkynet:

Secure by Design

Several experts have predicted that the rapid development of the IoT with little attention being paid to security will lead to widespread attacks in the coming year—often directed at industrial and infrastructure targets. At the same time, they lament the lack of robust security solutions built into hardware, software, and services. James Goepel, CEO and General Counsel for Fathom Cyber mentioned new regulations in California that mandate a secure-by-design approach to the IoT. “I think we’re going to see many more states, and possibly the federal government, following California’s lead and creating legislation that imposes new cybersecurity-by-design requirements on IoT manufacturers,” he said. Skkynet’s customers will be ready, as they have been employing our secure-by-design approach to the IoT for years.

Edge and Hybrid Computing

This year “will be a defining year for edge and hybrid computing strategies as IoT and the global network of sensors pile on more data than the average cloud has had to handle in the past,” according to Alan Conboy, working in the Office of the CTO at Scale Computing. “This transition will officially crown edge computing as the next big thing.” This has certainly been our experience. As interest in edge computing grows, we are seeing a corresponding demand for Skkynet’s edge computing and hybrid cloud solutions.

Remote Access

“Experienced engineers are hard to find and those they do have can only visit so many remote sites in a year. Enabled by 5G and the speed with which data can travel through the air, AR (augmented reality) will enable engineers-in-training to be able to have instant intelligence about a device on which they may be working just by pointing their tablet towards it,” said Jeff Travers, Head of IoT Connectivity Management at Ericsson. Much of this remote connectivity will depend on secure, real-time, two-way data flow. Again, Skkynet’s unique approach to Industrial IoT solves problems that many managers and executives are only now beginning to realize exist.

In short, the future continues to brighten for IoT in general, and Industrial IoT in particular. At least part of our mission is to make the move to IoT as smooth and easy as possible. We want it to become the logical choice for anyone who considers it—so that it really does become IoT for all.

Renewable Power is Now Affordable

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In the late 1980s I was working at company in the USA that sold natural gas through direct purchase. Always on the lookout for new opportunities in the energy field, at one point they gave me a special assignment to research solar energy. We needed to know when solar would be cost-effective, competitive with coal, oil, gas, or nuclear.

In those pre-Internet days, I had to head over to the nearby university library and pore through scientific journals and economic publications to come up with some predictions. From all I could gather, the experts seemed to agree that solar would take at least 5 years before it would be worthwhile to invest in. So the project went on hold, but I was eagerly looking forward to a clean, renewable source of energy to become widely available in the early ’90s.

Well, it has actually taken closer to 30 years, but it appears that the tide is finally turning. A recent report from the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) says that renewable power, including solar and wind, were more affordable in 2017 than ever before, and are now strongly competitive in many locations and applications.

A few IRENA report findings

“Renewable power generation costs continue to fall and are already very competitive to meet needs for new capacity.”

“The levelized cost of electricity (LCOE) from solar photovoltaics (PV) decreased by 69% between 2010 and 2016 – coming well into the cost range of fossil fuels.”

“Onshore wind, whose costs fell 18% in the same period, provides very competitive electricity, with projects routinely commissioned nowadays at USD 0.04/kWh.”

“As installation accelerates, the cost equation for renewables just gets better and better. With every doubling of cumulative installed capacity for onshore wind, investment costs drop by 9% while the resulting electricity becomes 15% cheaper.”

I find these statistics very encouraging, because now more than ever, the world needs abundant sources of energy at affordable prices. This is the energy that will power industry, commerce, and households for decades and centuries to come.

Data connectivity plays a role

I’m also pleased that Skkynet is responsible, in a quiet but important way, for some of these cost reductions. With increasingly more efficient and secure data connectivity, our customers who install and monitor wind turbines or solar panels are improving their quality of service and cutting their costs. Ultimately these savings are passed on to the consumers and industrial users of the energy. As the costs continue to drop, investment in renewables will increase.

Of course, conventional power plants, pipelines, and offshore oil platforms are also cutting their costs through secure remote monitoring and supervisory control. Improved access to production data benefits everyone across the board. So, I expect that the changeover to renewables will continue in the same gradual, steady way into the foreseeable future. Let’s see what the next 30 years have in store.

Industrial Product Servitization Via the IIoT

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Now there’s a ten-dollar word for you: “servitization.” It has emerged from the trend of industrialized societies to move away from manufacturing-based economies towards service-based economies. Applying this trend to products, the term “servitization” was popularized by Tim Baines at Aston Business School, who sees a “product as a platform for delivering services.” IBM shifts its focus from selling computers to selling business services. Rolls Royce sells propulsion instead of jet engines. Alstom ties its railroad maintenance contracts not to reduced equipment failures, but to fewer “lost customer hours.” These are just a few examples of servitization—a transition from selling products to selling services.

In a recent article, Servitization for Industrial Products, Ralph Rio at ARC Advisory Group shows how the trend of servitization is now impacting the factory floor itself. As production machinery grows increasingly sophisticated, plant managers find their staff less able to maintain and repair it by themselves. They need more services from vendors. Machine builders and OEMs are providing more training, more extensive maintenance contracts, and better condition monitoring of the equipment they supply. “Services have become an inseparable component of the product,” Rio says.

Benefits

The benefits are significant. Predictive maintenance offered as a service means reduced stoppages due to equipment failure, and fewer but more efficient service calls when problems do arise. A growing trend is to provide condition monitoring services, which guide operators to run their machinery more effectively, increasing the lifespan of the equipment and improving output and product quality.

To be most effective, condition monitoring needs to run 24/7 in real time, ideally via a connection to the equipment vendor or supplier. Thus, the Industrial IoT is the logical choice for data communication. “To implement servitization, suppliers will need to adopt Industrial IoT for condition monitoring,” Rio predicts.

Two-way street

As we see it, this level of service works best as a two-way street. Data related to the condition of the machine flows to the supplier, while guidance and adjustments coming from the supplier can flow back the plant staff and equipment. This kind of feedback is invaluable for optimizing machine performance. A one-way IoT model that simply collects data for off-line analysis may not be adequate for many use cases. Technically more sophisticated, bidirectional data flow is useful in many condition monitoring scenarios, and thus has always been an option for Skkynet customers.

If the lessons of the past few decades are any indicator, the servitization trend will continue to grow, both among industrialized and emerging nations. And the Industrial IoT will almost certainly play an important role in providing data communications. As long as those communications are robust and secure, we can expect to see more and more IoT-based industrial product servitization, even though that term itself may never become a household word.

Digital Transformation in Wonderware and AVEVA

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This one is local.  Although our DataHub software is running in pretty much every industrialized country in the world, and our SkkyHub service connects plants and offices across nations and continents, next week we will be travelling just down the street to participate in the Wonderware Canada East Knowledge Transfer Event, right here in Mississauga, Ontario.

Skkynet, Cogent (a Skkynet subsidiary), and the DataHub products have a long history with Wonderware.  The first large-scale implementation of DataHub technology, which ran for more than 20 years, was at a chocolate manufacturing plant in Toronto.  Initially tasked with providing a fast and reliable connection between Wonderware InTouch running in Windows and QNX-based supervisory control systems, Cogent introduced the real-time middleware architecture that is the functional precursor of DataHub, SkkyHub, ETK and DHTP technology.

Since that time the Wonderware company was acquired by Schneider Electric, and earlier this year there was a merger between Schneider Electric’s industrial software business and the AVEVA Group, one of the world’s largest providers of engineering and industrial software. One of the primary goals of the merger was to “accelerate how capital-intensive industries achieve end-to-end digital transformation.”

In fact, the theme of next week’s Knowledge Transfer Event is “Increase Your Competitive Edge through Digital Transformation.”  Put simply, digital transformation is how the Industrial IoT and related digital technologies are currently changing the industrial landscape.  AVEVA’s position is that “understanding the technology and driving forces behind digital transformation is the key to mastering the digital future of industry.”

As an AVEVA partner, with DataHub products listed on the AVEVA Digital Exchange, Skkynet has been a strong supporter and proponent of digital transformation.  Our participation in this upcoming event is focused on educating Wonderware users, distributors and partners on how Skkynet’s DataHub technology can meet the needs for secure streaming of the industrial data involved in digital transformation.

After more than two decades, Skkynet continues to build a relationship with Wonderware that started in real-time industrial data communication, and is now evolving into digital transformation.  What exactly will that look like?  If you happen to be in Mississauga next week, feel free to stop by the event to meet us and find out.

How Much Control Goes to the Cloud?

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None. That’s what any reasonable automation engineer will tell you.  Or at least, that’s what he or she would have said a few years back.  Today, with growing interest and acceptance of Industrial IoT and Industrie 4.0, the message is starting to change.  People are talking about the possibility of doing supervisory control through cloud-based systems.  For example, the cover theme of last month’s issue of Control Engineering was “Optimize controls via cloud software“, and it included articles from MESA, Honeywell, and Skkynet related to cloud-based control of manufacturing.

Our contribution was a short article titled: “Control in the cloud: How much?”  In it we point out how users and suppliers are becoming more sophisticated in their understanding, and are starting to look at edge computing as an alternative to cloud computing.  We encourage plant engineers and managers to get the best of both approaches by putting computing power where it is needed.

We identify four areas where real-time processing can take place:

Device: Adding compute power to sensors and other equipment can reduce the amount of data sent to the plant and cloud, and also simplify upstream processing.

Plant: This is where most industrial computing has taken place traditionally, and where new computing tasks can support IIoT to improve efficiency.

Gateway: Processing and filtering data at the gateway can support installed SCADA and HMI systems by serving as an intelligent interface to the cloud.

Cloud: By reducing, managing, and enhancing the quality of the data at or near the source, cloud computing resources become more effective.

As you might expect, what you gain from using cloud services for industrial control depends on how you manage the data you send to the cloud and what you need to get back in return. The article explains how choosing the right level for each computing task can reduce costs and generate a quicker round trip time for any data or analytics that come back to the plant.

Balancing the data load at each step in the process seems to be the key to a successful implementation, and adding edge computing where it is needed looks to be the thing that pulls it all together.

When Edge Computing Makes Sense

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As the concept of cloud computing becomes more familiar to industrial automation engineers and system integrators, the discussion has moved from “Whether I should use it?” to “When should I use it?”  In a recent blog, “Edge or Cloud Analytics?“, Michael Guilfoyle at ARC Advisory Group looks at the business case of cloud computing for industrial applications and compares it to edge computing.  It comes as no surprise that in many instances edge computing makes more sense.

So, what exactly is edge computing?  Generally speaking, it is the processing power of the “things” in the Internet of Things (IoT).  It has become an economically attractive complement for the cloud in IoT, thanks to rapid cost decreases for small-scale processors.  And edge computing has additional benefits for Industrial IoT (IIoT) because it means that data can be processed closer to its source.

Six Factors Favoring Edge Computing

Guilfoyle lists six factors that typically favor edge computing:

  • Connectivity: Some industrial systems are located in environments that make it difficult to maintain the regular connections necessary to sustain cloud computing.
  • Immediacy: For any mission-critical system, the closer you can get to real-time decision-making, the better. Running right on the device itself, an edge-processing system can respond in a few milliseconds, compared to a cloud system which would take at least 100 milliseconds, and often longer.
  • Volume: Industrial systems churn out enormous volumes of data, very little of which is of much interest. Edge computing can monitor the data and filter out what is irrelevant. This reduces bandwidth and frees up cloud-computing resources.
  • Cost: Related to volume, feeding large quantities of raw data to the cloud for processing is not cost effective. It is more economical to at least filter the data, or better still process it locally and send the relevant results to the cloud.
  • Privacy: Company policy or government regulations may prevent connecting process data directly to the cloud.
  • Security: Gateway hardware or software at the edge can be used to help control inbound access to the plant. Skkynet’s DHTP protocol, for example, supports outbound-only connections, keeping all firewall ports closed and eliminating the need for VPNs.
Data Abstraction – A Seventh Factor

In addition to these six factors, we would add another important contribution that edge processing can make towards enhancing the value of cloud computing: data abstraction, the ability to generalize data protocols.  The DHTP protocol, in addition to supporting secure connections, also supports data abstraction.  Skkynet’s edge-processing tools, the ETK and DataHub, can convert data from multiple connected protocols into one universal format consisting of name, value, timestamp and quality.  Using DHTP, data abstracted in this form can be transported with minimal overhead across a TCP connection and converted back into its previous protocol, or other protocols, upon its arrival.

Data abstraction solves one of the problems often associated with the Industrial IoT—the wide range of incompatible protocols.  To get all the IIoT devices talking to each other, they need a common language.  Data abstraction implemented at the edge provides a way for each device to share its data with the cloud, and to receive inputs from other devices.

For all of these reasons—connectivity, immediacy, volume, cost, privacy, security, and data abstraction—edge computing makes a lot of sense for IIoT implementations, as it allows data to be processed close to where it is needed, providing the most value at the least cost.