Connectivity challenge

The global market for IoT is projected to reach $7.1 trillion by 2020, while estimates on the number of devices that will be part of the IoT by the same year range from 26 billion to a mind-boggling 200 billion. Already, the number of devices connected to the Internet outnumbers the human population, a milestone reached as early as 2008, and is growing explosively.

The Industrial Internet of Things

Lying behind these numbers are not just connected fridges, meters, cars, and personal devices. The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) – where sensors, devices, and controls are embedded in industrial systems and communicate with each other via Ethernet while all their vast data is collected, analysed, and acted upon – is a burgeoning area that is being heralded as the cornerstone of the factory of the future, or ‘Industry 4.0’ (a reference to the fourth iteration of the industrial revolution). In this scenario, all components control the production process autonomously and strongly augment the decision making process where expert human oversight is necessary. All of this is made possible thanks to secure, context-preserving interconnectivity. Whether those components are people, machines, equipment, or systems, everything is set to be interconnected, to collect information and to share it.

IIoT is already redefining industrial processes, and with it business operations (work process, job focus, scheduling), the supply chain (inventory, quality issues), and partners’ eco-systems and end-users. Based on this premise, a future where a factory can automatically do everything from scaling up production based on market demand data and price, to ordering materials and replacement parts – is not far away.

However, operators face obstacles to enabling a shift towards such enhanced connectivity and to fully realising the efficiency, cost-reductions, and safety benefits that IIoT can deliver.

Preparing for the paradigm shift in operations promised by IIoT is the critical connectivity challenge for today’s businesses. Existing systems are already casting challenges around connectivity that many are struggling to meet, and these must be overcome in order to maximise existing assets and pave the way for the introduction of IIoT. The primary hurdle is that controllers, DCSs, analysers, and other devices commonly come from different third-party vendors but still need to communicate with each other.

Interconnectivity between various devices is the lynchpin that underscores the vision of IIoT, given all sensors, controls, and automated devices will need to ‘talk’ to one another, and in order to do so need a common language to exchange their context rich data in meaningful ways.

A common language

The solution for many players in the control automation space lies in the OPC standard from the OPC Foundation. The standard enables interoperability at all levels: device-to-device, device-to-the-enterprise, and beyond. Arguably the world’s best suited open data exchange process, it facilitates in the secure access, collection and transport of data in a common form between various devices, control systems, and applications across an organisation.

The evolution of OPC, OPC Unified Architecture (OPC UA), is already developed with IIoT in mind. With no platform or OS dependencies, OPC UA applications are easily written for virtually any environment, which allows them to be fully scalable, running on anything from the microcontroller level all the way up to virtualized enterprise servers. Thanks to its power and flexibility, OPC UA is seeing rapid adoption as a common method of establishing secure, open standards-based connectivity across the enterprise and is being increasingly incorporated by vendors directly into devices themselves. One of the benefits this heralds for end-users is that additional computers are not needed between devices and the consumers of their data, because OPC UA connections can be made directly.

The good news for companies already using the original, classic OPC based, drivers and applications is that they can continue to use their existing OPC infrastructures, because software like OPC UA Proxy and OPC UA Wrapper facilitate communications with the newer, growing list of OPC UA components.

Embedded technology such as OPC UA enables open connectivity across the devices, sensors and controllers of an industrial environment, paving the way for the factory of the future to become the factory of today.