It seems that every day, one can pick up a technology journal or view an online technology article about the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT). The articles usually provide insights into specific solutions to business problems or how a specific technology component is evolving to provide a function necessary in deploying an Industrial Internet solution.
If you are undertaking one of your first IIoT projects, this book will provide you with the background needed. The authors have attempted to provide both timely and timeless guidance. The IIoT ecosystem is rapidly evolving, and we'll describe some of those changes in various locations in this book. Yet, we also see that justifications for these projects and use cases are falling into repeatable patterns. The overall architecture is generally well-understood and is also largely repeated, even while individual technology components are growing more capable and sophisticated.
The Industrial Internet Consortium (IIC) provides useful documentation in defining key aspects of the IIoT architecture that the architect must consider. We'll reference the IIC documentation frequently in this book. However, we also felt a desire to provide guidance as to how the architecture is applied in projects as these solutions are defined.
An area of intense interest, as this book was published, is securing the IIoT and the governance of Industrial Internet solutions. In a portion of the book that covers these topics, we’ll provide what we believe is practical guidance and point to the many worldwide, regional, and industry standards that can impact your designs.
Solutions, component capabilities, and certifications around standards are very fluid and will probably have changed between the time we wrote this book and the time you read this. In areas where rapid change is occurring, the content should provide you with a launching point for you to do your own further discovery. We have a lengthy list of sources in an appendix in this book.
The authors of this book work at some of the leading providers of IIoT frameworks and solutions; we have called upon that experience in writing this book, but have sought to do so in a manner that should be largely vendor agnostic.
Our goal is to help you fully realize the complexity and promises of these projects, but also help you gain the experience needed to architect successful solutions. You are probably at an early stage in your journey that will consist of many stages. We hope that you will find the book a useful place to start or add knowledge where you currently have gaps.
Chapter 1, The Industrial Internet Revolution, describes how we reached today's IIoT solutions and the role of the architect.
Chapter 2, Architectural Approaches for Success, talks about architecture viewpoints, the implementation viewpoint, data and analytics, and using proof of concepts to evaluate design.
Chapter 3, Gathering Business Requirements, covers topics such as preparing for business discovery, gathering critical success factors, business benefits and key performance indicators, gaining an understanding of skills, evaluating data sources, value from early mockups and proof of concepts, prioritizing stages, building the business case, and selling the project.
Chapter 4, Mapping Requirements to a Functional Viewpoint, describes the control, operations, information, application, and business domains, and DevOps and the agile development movement.
Chapter 5, Assessing Industrial Internet Applications, covers architecture patterns, build versus buy considerations, asset performance management, analytics, the Brilliant Factory, and a field services application.
Chapter 6, Defining the Data and Analytics Architecture, describes typical requirements and capabilities, the Lambda architecture, analytics, machine learning and analyst tools, early Industrial Internet applications and historians, and the speed and batch layers in the architecture.
Chapter 7, Defining a Deployment Architecture, covers past and current architecture, on-premises and cloud deployment, designing for the edge, networking considerations, device management, management and support infrastructure, and consumption models.
Chapter 8, Securing the Industrial Internet, describes examples of cybersecurity attacks, core building blocks, NIST cybersecurity frameworks, security guidelines, securing devices and communications to the cloud and backend, risk assessment, and best practices.
Chapter 9, Governance and Assuring Compliance, covers assessing governance, risk and compliance, international compliance, consortia and emerging standards, government and public institutions, industry compliance, and determining the guidelines that apply.
Chapter 10, Industrial Internet Use Cases in Various Industries, describes summarized use cases in various industries and then provides more in-depth looks at manufacturing, predictive maintenance, asset tracking and handling, and environmental impact and abatement.
Chapter 11, A Vision of the Future, covers the possible impacts of maturing frameworks and applications, evolution in edge devices, networking, human machine interfaces and industrial robotics, and the applicability of blockchain and quantum computing in the future.
Appendix, Sources, provides a list of sources the authors used throughout this book that might prove useful in your own research.
In several chapters of this book, we apply what is learned to a supply chain optimization example that can be relevant in many industries.
The book assumes that the reader possesses a basic IT and technology architecture background. There are no coding examples as that is beyond the scope of this book.
This book is intended to be used by architects as they gather requirements, justify projects, and consider the components that they will include in the architecture of their Industrial Internet projects. Others in roles involved in defining these projects should also find this book to be of value.
In this book, you will find a number of text styles that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles and an explanation of their meaning.
New terms and important words are shown in bold.
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