The Industrial Internet Consortium (IIC) has published its latest technical document on the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT). Joining the Industrial Internet Reference Architecture (IIRA), Industrial Internet Vocabulary Technical Report, Industrial Internet Security Framework (IISF), and more is the Industrial Internet of Things Analytics Framework (IIAF), a comprehensive document for IIoT system architects and businesses looking to deploy IIoT analytics systems.
The IIAF, like all of the IIC’s technical documents, was a collaborative effort by experts from many IIC member companies, including National Instruments, Thingswise, Huawei Technologies, Dell EMC and more.
The document is organized into sections covering a broad range of viewpoints and topics central to industrial analytics. These include business, usage, functional and implementation viewpoints; artificial intelligence (AI) and big data; analytics methods and modeling; and system characteristics and crosscutting functions related to analytics.
The IIAF also warns of the unique concerns inherent in industrial data analytics. Since analytical insights have the potential to affect physical change in dangerous settings (for example, a nuclear power plant), it’s critical to be confident in the correctness of IIoT analytics systems. “Any system that interprets and acts on the results must have safeguards against undesirable and unintended physical consequence,” cautions the IIC.
In spite of the risks, the IIAF nonetheless emphasizes the high value of IIoT analytics.
“Advanced analytics is at the core of [IIoT] and, when applied to machine and process data, provides new insights and intelligence to optimize decision making significantly and enable intelligent operations leading to transformational business outcomes and social value,” reads the IIAF. “These new insights and intelligence can be applied across any level of any industry if the appropriate data can be collected and analytics applied correctly. If data is the new oil, data analytics is the new engine that propels the IIoT transformation.”
To read the IIAF for yourself, visit the IIC’s website. To learn more about industrial analytics, check out Predictive Maintenance Enabled by the IIoT Edge.