The industrial world is a very large category. It includes manufacturing, but also many other sectors, such as power and energy, renewable energies, health care, and so on. Inside manufacturing itself, there are a large variety of sectors, including the automotive industry, chemicals, food and drink, and pharmaceuticals. Production is also only one phase of the product life cycle. Besides this, we have design, provision, delivery (with its own supply chain), and the aftermarket phase.
In this book, we will focus on the manufacturing environment by considering factory processes and strictly tailoring our analysis on the data. We will look at how data is produced, stored, processed, enriched, and exchanged between different OT systems inside industrial plants, and also at how it can be gathered, transferred, stored, and processed in the cloud. We will consider a scenario in which we have a specialized device, the edge device, which is responsible for collecting the data from the OT systems of the factory and transferring it to the cloud on a very large scale. We will also cover scenarios in which each edge device gathers and manages thousands of signals coming from sensors with a sampling rate starting from 1 Hz. The analysis and the proposed solutions of these scenarios are also applicable to less complex cases in which there is no factory and/or with fewer signals to manage. For example, consider a wind turbine, where you need to monitor a piece of industrial equipment.
In this book, we will not cover scenarios in which there are too few signals to be collected for each data source to justify the need of an edge device.