Book Image

Architecting the Industrial Internet

By : Robert Stackowiak, Shyam Varan Nath, Carla Romano
Book Image

Architecting the Industrial Internet

By: Robert Stackowiak, Shyam Varan Nath, Carla Romano

Overview of this book

The Industrial Internet or the IIoT has gained a lot of traction. Many leading companies are driving this revolution by connecting smart edge devices to cloud-based analysis platforms and solving their business challenges in new ways. To ensure a smooth integration of such machines and devices, sound architecture strategies based on accepted principles, best practices, and lessons learned must be applied. This book begins by providing a bird's eye view of what the IIoT is and how the industrial revolution has evolved into embracing this technology. It then describes architectural approaches for success, gathering business requirements, and mapping requirements into functional solutions. In a later chapter, many other potential use cases are introduced including those in manufacturing and specific examples in predictive maintenance, asset tracking and handling, and environmental impact and abatement. The book concludes by exploring evolving technologies that will impact IIoT architecture in the future and discusses possible societal implications of the Industrial Internet and perceptions regarding these projects. By the end of this book, you will be better equipped to embrace the benefits of the burgeoning IIoT.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface

Architecture patterns for the Industrial Internet


A carefully selected architecture pattern represents an easy way to understand the abstraction of the IIoT implementation scenario. It allows reuse of best practices, alongside the flexibility to experiment with variations, within reason. We will look at the commonly used three-tier architecture pattern here. The three tiers are typically as follows:

  • Edge tier
  • Platform tier
  • Enterprise tier

The edge tier is mainly used to gather the sensor and machine data from the edge nodes. It uses the localized or the proximity network. The architectural features of the edge network include the nature of the localized or proximity network. The distribution and the location of the devices are other considerations at this stage. Deciding whether all the data collected is forwarded to the platform tier or data aggregation or processing is needed may help design this edge tier and its processing and storage capabilities.

The platform tier can be in a private data...