Industrial Internet of Things, Operations Technology (OT) combined with Information Technology (IT)

The first industrial era started with the invention of the vapor machine that took important part of the industrial revolution allowing the movement of pumps, trains, marine engines, etc. The second era began with the discovery of electricity and other sources of energy. The third era corresponds to the use of computers in the industry. The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) is considered as the fourth industrialization era.

We could imagine the results of connecting business models, the millions of devices that exist in factories, power plants, cars and even health care systems and at the same time relate them to the services or products offered to customers. These systems interconnections create an ecosystem that would drastically change business and industry models, improving processes, providing better products linked to better services, and creating solutions that can improve people's lives. The utility of the devices would increase considerably, creating smart devices that do not fail or that are repaired before the failure occurs.

All this would change the way we produce and consume and live, not only brings advantages to business and economic, also it offers advantages to the human being providing a better quality of products and services. This interconnectivity of systems can be achieved through IIoT.

The IIoT is a network of intelligent devices used in industry and business, containing embedded systems capable of sensing, communicating and interacting with other systems through the internet. These intelligent devices produce a large amount of information that is analyzed by specialized systems and through applications generate solutions capable to improve business models, industry, and products and services provided. Many industries are currently being transformed by the use of IIoT, industries that have a great impact on our lives, such as transportation, energy, aviation and health services.

In industry, the smart device network is usually connected to a local control system, this system receives the data and makes decisions based on the business requirements that were previously notified to the plant operators in order to comply with the production requirements. This device network and control system is known as the OT (Operation Technology). This domain directly controls the physical processes without trying to create symbols or models to be processed by the machines. The communication between sensors, controllers and actuators is data centered, exposing the data and encapsulating the methods.

On the other hand, we have internet networks, which are based on IT (Information Technology) domains, whose communication is reduced to bits representing ideas or methods in the head of the programmer that are transformed somehow to have a utility. This type of communication is object oriented, where it encapsulates the data and exposes the method, creating a problem since these objects pass through the controller and do not have a sense to the machine. However, because IT domains are used in networks with large systems, with large information flow, they have been able to develop algorithms for the optimization, ordering and analysis of information.

The IIoT combines the best of both domains, allowing a direct data communication from the sensors of the physical systems, a communication centered in data (OT) but also allows the efficient management of the information by algorithms capable of ordering the information, analyze it for valuable information and optimize information searches to be shared with other systems for decision making. In addition, the IIoT is looking for other concepts developed by IT such as machine learning, which is a type of artificial intelligence (AI) that provides computers with the ability to learn without being explicitly programs as they gather more information.

Due to the large amount of information acquired by smart devices, a tendency has been developed to store and analyze information through cloud services. There are many companies in charge of providing storage and analysis of information in the cloud.

Of course, the incorporation of IT concepts into the OT domain creates a certain susceptibility to the problems IT faces, such as network attacks. Safety is one of the most discussed issues regarding the implementation of IIoT to industrial control systems as it could give theft of confidential information or sabotage in industrial processes that could cause even fatal accidents. That’s why many companies are inverting millions of dollars trying to improve the security of these systems.

The IIoT will change the way business is handled, industrial processes and in general the way we live, we are facing a new era of industrialization, a concept of systems integration whose purpose is to offer us better services and intelligent information.