PECM Issue 18 2016 | Page 103

Dave Hammond is Product Manager at M.A.C. Solutions, who is the preferred partner for Kepware in the UK and an Authorized Reseller in France. For more information or to download the full white paper “Industrial Internet of Things and Communications at the Edge” by Tony Paine, CEO of Kepware Technologies, please visit www.mac-solutions.net or www.kepware.com or telephone MAC Solutions on 01527 529774 or email [email protected] impediment, as Things become added at an unprecedented rate. Challenge 2: Discovering Things and the data they possess Once a Thing can be identified, the next challenge is how other interested parties will discover that it exists and what data it possesses. Of course, a Thing should be able to restrict discovery of some or all of its data, based on security requirements. Balancing ease of discovery with the rigid constraints of security will be fundamental to the success of IIoT and must be achievable without a PhD in cyber security. Challenge 1: Identifying Things within the Internet Challenge 3: Managing massive amounts of data In order for Things to be able to communicate with each other, they need to be uniquely identifiable within the Internet. Historically, this has been accomplished through a unique Internet Protocol (IP) address. As industry looks ahead to the trillions of Things that will be connected, focus has been placed on adopting the Ipv6 standard, which defines a 128-bit address capable of uniquely identifying 340 undecillionth (340 x 1036) addressable items (compared with only 4 billion addressable items using today’s Ipv4 standard). These trillions of Things will produce something much larger than trillions of data points, all of which will need to be collected, analysed and possibly archived. Moving this amount of data over the Internet will consume new levels of bandwidth, which could result in the degradation of service as well as higher costs for Internet carriers, service providers, and ultimately end users. Moreover, archiving this data for future analysis will require massive amounts of data storage and a new generation of scalable analytical applications capable of honing in on individual points of interest, in a timely manner. This range will more than cover the requirements of IIoT. However, it will be difficult – if not impossible – to manage this effectively on a global Internet scale. Typically, such tasks have historically been achieved by Naming and Number Authorities, with the aid of Network Administrators, but this will likely be an Challenge 4: Navigating connectivity outages The Things that make up IIoT, as well as the communication mediums that link them together, will not be available 100 per cent of the time, resulting in intermittent or even long term outages. This could severely impact systems where data loss is unacceptable or where variances in the data needs to be known in real-time. Challenge 5: Integrating existing infrastructure into new IIoT strategie s For decades, Industrial Things have made data accessible over private, site networks, through the implementation of open or proprietary protocols. And in the past, complexities such as security have largely been ignored, in order to achieve optimisation and integration between dissimilar industrial systems, within a private environment. Given that the typical lifecycle for industrial Things exceeds 20 years, there will be an expectation to integrate the existing into new IIoT strategies. Opening these private networks and the data they contain to the Internet will require detailed security assessments to minimise risk of exploitation. The promise of connecting everything within an industrial environment, to get complete operational visibility and allow for the best real-time decisions, will transform how we manufacture for years to come. The premise for this next industrial evolution is the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), says Tony Paine, CEO of Kepware Technologies.