IIoT - Industrial Internet of Things

The Industrial Internet of Things is less about smart appliances and more about smart factories. IoT, or the Internet of Things is mostly focused on consumer based devices.

An IIoT infrastructure for manufacturing would be the connection of smart sensors, devices, machines, instrumentation, cloud platforms which are all networked and feeding industrial software applications. This allow stakeholder access to every piece of information from how much did we produce today all the down to the contents of the vehicles in the transportation layer. IIoT is part of the next industrial revolution which is about mining and turning data into information. This methodology is known as Industry 4.0 which can be thought of as a digital transformation of automation. Can be used to tack and schedule maintenance. Feeds realtime data to monitor productivity and output. Automatically order raw goods and set up outbound shipping. Can range from 1 to hundreds of thousand of endpoints which may be across many separate facilities in different geographic locations. All of this collected and analyzed data leads to faster and better business decisions.

Two common protocols for communication in an IIoT environment would be MQTT and OPC-UA MQTT . Often, MQTT (Message Queuing Telemetry Transport) is an open network protocol used to connect various applications and systems often to a unified organized data space using ISA95 standards. OPC UA (Open Platform Communications Unified Architecture) is used to connect machines and is a pay to play model having a licensing fee. MQTT is less verbose and minimizes overhead so it can offer better performance over OPC UA for moving information to a data broker. OPC UA is a robust, secure and scalable and for some considered the standard for on premises machine to machine communication. They both are Publish-Subscribe models. Many IIoT solutions may included both of these protocols.