Building complex Industrial IoT systems that balance costs, risks, the cloud, stakeholder needs, inputs and actions is difficult at best.
We talked about having a framework in a previous post to outline a project, but, there are a multitude of industry specific nuances that bend an IoT Framework to meet application-specific needs.
A first time project for your organization will have pitfalls, connectivity issues and surprises. Implementation teams can minimize first time surprises with the help of a real, applicable reference design coupled with an IoT design team. Enter the Industrial Internet Consortium’s Testbeds and Hallsten Innovations.
Hallsten Innovations is a full service design company that specializes in IoT projects. While we may begin with developing a device or integrating a sensor into an IoT ecosystem, it is common for our integration team to deliver a complete IoT ecosystem with data transport, cloud, database and dashboard applications.
These industry specific testbeds provide outstanding stepping stones upon which we reference to build development plans.
Available IIoT Testbed Applications
The IIC Testbeds below span a variety of applications. At the time of this article, I was a little underwhelmed at how well the IIC described the various reference designs, so, here’s my recap as of January 2019 regarding the more industrial applications:
- Asset Efficiency Testbed -Are you using your manufacturing or production assets to maximum efficiency? See this test bed to explore the switch to condition based maintenance (CBM), failure mode analysis, and asset management complete with system and data analytics.
- Condition Monitoring and Predictive Maintenance Testbed – Explore the real time monitoring of an entire factory floor of equipment with sensor data sent to the cloud for predictive maintenance. Additionally, find correlation in the data between multiple machines affected by similar conditions.
- Connected Care Testbed – This imitative looks at hospital data from patient treatment, alerts and alarms, to device tracking and patient analytics.
- Connected Vehicle UTM Testbed – A full traffic management IoT data and management system complete with V2V (vehicle to vehicle) and V2I (Vehicle to Infrastructure) technologies.
- Connected Workforce Safety – Create a sensor-enabled workforce to improve workplace safety in order to monitor and proactively manage worker health and job assignments.
- Deep Learning Facility Testbed – Take your facility efficiency to the next level with a Deep Learning enabled facility system.
- Factory Automation PaaS – Platform as a Service applied to Factory Automation – Discover the value of connectivity up and down stream and a simplified implementation path.
- Factory Automation Visibility & Intelligence Testbed – FA with a focus on visualization, simulation, and intelligent decision making.
- Industrial Digital Thread Testbed – Track data, product, raw materials and production processes from vendor to final production.
- INFINITE Testbed – An Industrial platform that allows multiple virtual domains to securely run one physical network with a focus on mobile access.
- Intelligent Urban Water Supply – With a focus on cost, this system connects water supply assets to the cloud and monitors quality, leakage, capability and energy consumption.
- Manufacturing Quality Management Testbed – A testbed that focuses on the retrofit actions of adding an Industrial Internet Reference Architecture based platform to an existing manufacturing plant.
- Microgrid Testbed – A Communication and Control architecture of an re-designed grid to monitor and manage load, generation and storage across many independent microgrids.
- Optimizing Manufacturing Processes with AI – Run AI models and edge applications to optimize your manufacturing process.
- Smart Airline Baggage Management – Reduce delayed, damaged and lost baggage rates by monitoring location and weight changes of individual baggage assets.
- Smart Energy Management – A system that provides the tools to monitor, visualize, analyze and optimize campus-wide energy usage.
- Smart Factory Machine Learning for Predictive Maintenance -Employ Deep learning techniques to analyze big data to efficiently handle machine maintenance requirements.
- Smart Factory Web Testbed– Form a network of physically separated factories with advanced data sharing and communication to optimize production. Uses AutomationML and OPC UA.
- Smart Manufacturing Connectivity – A virtual representation of sensors on the factory floor- essential for brownfield applications.
- Smart Water Management – Wide Geographic area water management system to monitor for water losses in a distribution network.
- Smart Printing Factory Testbed – An IIoT system specific for the needs of high volume industrial printing.
- Track and Trace Testbed – Manage hand held tool use, location and safety across manufacturing and other industrial environments.
IIoT Testbeds Partners and Implementation
While the Industrial Internet Consortium is a non-profit organization, it is indeed made up of many power players in the Industrial IoT space. Hallsten Innovations is partner agnostic. We act as project leaders and guides through the many decisions that need to take place in crafting an well-optimized IoT system. Whether it be making a decision between the cloud providers, security methodologies, processors, sensors, integrations, analytics, alerts or wireless network structures, we have the experience of working through those decisions and knowing the pitfalls which gets you to market quicker.