The Industrial Internet Consortium recently announced the IIC Resource Hub, a new interface designed to help users access IIoT industry resources developed by the IIC; as well as IIoT Project Explorer, a web-based tool that guides users through the analysis and planning of their own IIoT projects.
The IIC Resource Hub not only references IIC resources including knowledge and expertise from IIC foundational documents, testbed insights, toolkits, demos and relationships with global standards and industry groups, but also provides actionable intelligence. It is designed for use across industries and among technical and business stakeholders in the IIoT. The IIC has a large database of papers, studies and testbeds, which can be difficult to parse through.
Engineering.com spoke to Stephen J. Mellor, computer scientist and CTO of the IIC, about these new research tools. “One of the problems with online research is that you are searching for something that you don’t know you need,” he said. “We’re developing our resources toward more accessible and more digestible chunks. The resource hub captures relevant documents and points you to the chapter you need.”
“There is nothing like the IIC Resource Hub on the market now,” said Dirk Slama, Vice President of Business Development, Bosch Software Innovations and Chair of the IIC Steering Committee. “Members of the IIC have developed these essential resources for the industry so project managers and system architects don’t have to rely solely on intuition and prototyping in unchartered territory as they do today. The IIC Resource Hub will help lead to successful IoT implementations and facilitate the multi-billion dollar opportunities of the IIoT.”
The IIC Resource Hub comprises the following:
IIC Body of Knowledge:
This includes collaborative resources that have been developed, tested and published by industry leaders from the IIC membership, including: testbed overviews and outcomes, Insight Reports, IIC foundational documents (Industrial Internet Reference Architecture, Industrial Internet Security Framework, Industrial Internet Connectivity Framework, Business Strategy and Innovation Framework, Industrial Internet of Things Analytics Framework, and Vocabulary Technical Report), and select white papers.
The IIoT Project Explorer:
This is a web-based methodology for creating an assessment of an IoT project. The IIoT Project Explorer enables users to scope a solution and create a mutual basis for communication between technical and business project stakeholders. It also directs a quantitative method for developing implementation, rollout and growth plans.
Ecosystem Directory:
This is a mapping of the IIoT ecosystem that categorizes IIoT products, services, researchers and end users, making experts searchable by their expertise.
“The explorer allows you to answer a series of questions in your browser that help profile your project. The multiple-choice questions ask things like, ‘how many data points do you have?’ ‘what’s the data rate?’ and so on,” Mellor explained. (Your answers are not collected by the IIC, the data stays on your browser side.) “What you get back is a project profile, which outlines what your project is, and then it makes good suggestions about reading material you might need.
For example, it may suggest that you learn more about one of our architecture patterns, which is in our IIC reference architecture, buried on page 163 of some document. It will point you to the resources you need to read; including platforms, technologies, products, frameworks and best practices. All of this will help you manage risk and get started more rapidly.
We’re trying to help you navigate all the things you don’t know and all the things you don’t know to check.”
“The newly launched IIC Resource Hub offers much needed clarity around IIoT project management and offers guided access to valuable resources for accelerating industrial IoT deployments,” says Dima Tokar, Co-founder of MachNation, an IIoT platform and services testing and research company.
Other Explorers, under development as web-based toolkits will provide assistance with maturity modeling, security assessment and interoperability challenges.
According to the Consortium, the IIC Resource Hub is an essential tool helping IIoT stakeholders strategize, analyze and plan IIoT projects. The IIC Resource Hub delivers actionable intelligence and is free and accessible at hub.iiconsortium.org/.