2016 Hannover Fair | IIoT Plant Architectures, a Bridge to Cross

Kory Chance, instrumentation tech at Iowa municipal power plant, reveals the benefits of having an outside condition-monitoring service for such a small operation and be able to remove certain preventative maintenance routines.

There’s been a lot of IIoT discussion lately with conference season heating up and topics have included legacy equipment and network architecture, such as edge devices. With service pilot projects firmly established for remote monitoring in oil and power plant applications, what about actual plant strategies?

So, how will existing plant control architectures move to IIoT strategies. At the recent 2016 Hannover Fair, Dell and Intel sponsored a Think Tank session that featured our old colleague Gary Mintchell. It’s a great session and highlights included a discussion about edge analytics and distributed architectures in plants that usually features centralized PLCs for line operations:

From the Manufacturing Connection:

Intel’s Chet Hullum, suggested, “Ancillary equipment brings the IoT to fruition. We could cut network bandwidth. We don’t need the pump to report 2,000 times per second it’s on. We just need the anomaly. We can do that at the edge. But we will also need tools to find the experts and match to data we are collecting and analyzing at the edge.”

Timothy Kaufmann from SAP taking the broad view noted, “Customers need to architect their system intentionally to allow for their needs and how they can/will collect data. We also must educate customers on what data they really need. It’s not big data, but smart data.”

Getting to that data is another issue altogether. In a recent interview with Mark Duncan, Segment Manager at Schneider Electric, he discusses integration challenges for brownfield applications.

Duncan: The problem is usually what kind of investment you want to make—immediate or long term. Both come with different solutions and cost. For immediate solutions, integration into older PLC products is done via software. Software solutions offer the ability to communicate with different kinds of data and hardware. Software is an enabler. It links all of these disparate systems together. Software solutions also enable simulation and prototyping, with the ability to create virtual models of the machines.

A long-term solution is upgrading your automation equipment. New equipment will have the latest tech and many have been designed for future proofing—the ability to use giga-Ethernet speeds, for example—so that the technology is adaptable for years to come.