Naturally, standard Ethernet does not guarantee real-time communication.  So, to provide guaranteed cycle times and latencies for machine control and process automation using Ethernet, vendors implemented real-time Fieldbus protocols on top of it.  Thereby creating a specialised type of Ethernet that is unusable for anything else, and causes fragmentation of industrial networks due to incompatibilities of Fieldbus protocols. But yet, for the success of Industry 4.0, what is required is one...

As the saying goes, "Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater". Many people in the manufacturing space are quick to dismiss Web 3, and justifiably, because of the recent sensationalism created around it by Big Tech. And yet, Web 3 has the potential to massively impact how we build production systems. In fact, the success of Industry 4.0 lies, to some extent, in the enablement of decentralised peer-to-peer networking of factories, with decentralised storage, compute, and connectivity. In...

Another year has come and gone, and still, almost every IIoT use case in manufacturing requires some sort of compute capability near the source of the data in order to solve some of the toughest challenges in Manufacturing Digital Transformation. But yet, the currently dominant model for Industrial IoT is the Cloud-Based Platform-As-A-Service. The issue is, while Edge Computing architectures do provide immense power and capabilities such as system resilience through delegation of...

The biggest challenge in the transition to Industry4.0 lies in the horizontal and vertical integration of information flow within and across manufacturing organisations, and the digitalisation of the engineering processes involved.  Among the technologies and standards developed to enable this flow of information, is the compelling combination of AutomationML, OPC UA, and the Asset Administration Shell. To discuss this combination, I talked with Dr. Miriam Schleipen, the Chief Research...

Perhaps the most common silos of information in Process Industries are the skilled workers who possess rare knowledge on how to optimise processes and maintain production equipment using traditional methods.  The good news is, the future of manufacturing is one where plant assets and operations have the capability to autonomously learn and self adapt in order to optimise processes with minimal human intervention, thereby freeing the skilled human resource for more value-added tasks. And that...

Based on the undeniable success of Advanced Data Analytics in Internet Companies, there's no doubt that manufacturers could reap massive benefits from adopting this "Data First' approach. And for manufacturers, having this intelligent layer at the edge, closer to industrial data sources has proven to be more fitting and valuable. To gain an understanding of the application of Edge Analytics for intelligent automation, I had a conversation with Martin Thunman. Martin is the CEO and...

While IIoT protocols play a crucial role in communicating information from one industrial system to the next, the full value of IIoT can only be realised by standardising the vocabulary with which this information is communicated. The MTConnect Standard offers such a semantic vocabulary for manufacturing equipment like Machine Tool Controllers, Robotic Arms, CNC Machines, etc. And more importantly, it integrates with other communication standards.  To understand how MTConnect works and its...

By nature, industrial facilities consist of physical assets and processes that evolve through time. Therefore, each data point generated by such systems is essentially a snapshot of events at that particular point in time. By extension, this data wants to be stored in a way that reflects the sequential order of events, so that it can be rapidly queried and analysed, among many other reasons. But yet, this isn't a capability that is inherently baked into the more common Relational and NoSQL...

The success of a fully realised Industry4.0 lies in the democratisation of intelligence and the capacity for Industrial "Things" to autonomously act based on the knowledge they have. Effectively, turning each and every factory into a computer that is made up of modular processes within, in the form of Cyber-Physical systems. And central to that success, is the ease with which Industrial things like pumps and sensors can be embedded with Machine Learning functionality. To learn more about...

As Industrial IoT matures, most of the components in the IIoT stack have become commoditised. Things like hardware, OSes, drivers, protocols, databases e.t.c But yet, many organisations still develop custom interfaces for these components, instead of adopting standards. And in cases where there is adoption, there lacks an industry-wide consistent approach to standardisation. To understand the importance of standardisation for IIoT and how vendors and end-users should engage standards, I had...

At the present moment, it is quite clear that the future of industrial automation will be driven by software. More so, that of IIoT. And, due to the merits that have allowed it to dominate in the IT space, Open Source software is likely to lead the industrial software revolution. Regardless of the conservative nature of the industry. To discuss the use of Open Source in building IIoT solutions, I had a conversation with Frédéric Desbiens. Frédéric is the Program Manager for IoT and Edge...

Nowadays, with so many IIoT concepts in the air, you can't help but breathe it in.But sometimes it's helpful to take a step back and put all of this in context to understand how we got here, as that might help shed light on what IIoT is and isn't about.To gain a fundamental understanding of OT-IT integration, I had a conversation with Benson Hougland.Benson is VP of Product Strategy at Opto 22, a company that has been at the forefront of OT-IT integration for close to 30 years. From being a...

While it may be convenient to follow simple steps to get connectivity working for your IIoT solution, sometimes you are better off having an understanding of the elements that make up the broad spectrum of connectivity technologies.To understand the foundations upon which IoT protocols are built, I had a conversation with Dominik Obermaier. Dominik is the Co-Founder & CTO of HiveMQ, a company that provides an MQTT broker and a client-based messaging platform to over 130 customers...

Developed at LinkedIn in 2010, Apache Kafka - a stream processing engine, now powers web-scale Internet companies such as Netflix, Uber, Twitter, Airbnb, and more. Profoundly impacting real-time user experience.Of equal impact, is its application in creating a continuous streaming pipeline of manufacturing data, from the factory-floor to data centers. Fundamentally changing the structural organisation of manufacturing systems.To gain an understanding of Kafka in IIoT, I had a conversation...

So here's the thing, data from industrial sources is inherently messy. For example, a typical PLC system manages thousands of tags from both physical instruments and internal calculations, but this data is often unstructured, not linked to a unifying data model, and uses naming conventions that are vague to the outside world.This makes data from such sources not readily usable in analytics applications and has led to the emergence of a new field of industrial data preprocessing for IIoT,...

Advanced Data Analytics in Manufacturing Industry - Marcos Taccolini, the Founder and CTO of Tatsoft walks us through the foundations of building Advanced Data Analytics in the Manufacturing Industry. So if you want a detailed understanding of how you go about together Industrial IoT Plant-Floor Data Analytics.

A Practical Guide to Industrial IoT Connectivity - In this video, Stan Schneider walks us through the fundamentals of Industrial Internet Connectivity to help you understand and choose the right IoT Standards and Protocols. So if you want an in-depth guide to Industrial IoT Connectivity, then this is the episode for you.

Edge Computing Explained - In this video, Rob Tifanny walks us through the Fundamentals of Edge Computing. So if you want an in-depth understanding of what Edge Computing is all about then this is the video for you. Industrial IoT Podcast.

Industrial IoT architecture and Protocols Explained - In this video, Kudzai Manditereza talks to Rick Bullota who walks us through Industrial IoT Architecture Design principles and best practices. So if you want Industrial IoT architecture and protocols explained in-depth then this is the episode for you.

Digital Twins will, undoubtedly, transform how manufacturers build and maintain products. From consumer goods to complex structures such as buildings and aircraft. But as of now, confusion and lack of its grasp are limiting adoption.To understand the technology better, Kudzai Manditereza had a conversation with Pieter van Schalkwyk, CEO of XMPRO, whose company has helped Fortune 10 companies build Digital Twins.