Why there is no doubt...

The industrial landscape is radically changing with the implementation of Internet of Things (IoT) technologies which will bring significant challenges to manufacturers and their vendors in terms of software and hardware. These technologies are immature whilst other vendors are fighting now to grab their space in the new landscape. However, there is no doubt that IoT is here to stay. There are already many discussions and examples about preventative maintenance and how IoT may help manufacturers improve on the field. There is a shift from selling products or services towards selling measurable outcomes. People in the industry discuss about OEE more and more. Vendors of Manufacturing Execution Systems and Advanced Planning Systems need to embrace the new technologies and prepare for them, or else they risk ending up with obsolete systems. Designing software with modular architectures will allow for easier replacement of parts when better solutions materialise. Increasing interoperability with other systems will allow ‘plug and play’ to the new platforms and operating systems. This will extend reach outside their usual clientele who are cooperating with other software, which is stronger and has deeper specialisation in certain areas.

WHAT IS THE IOT AND WHY IT IS IMPORTANT?

There has been much discussion in journals and boards related to the IoT and how this new set of technologies will transform the manufacturing landscape. There have been dozens (hundreds?) of definitions for IoT in bibliography. This is just another fact which adds to the inevitability of deployment of these technologies. We will attempt a definition for IoT with simple words:

IoT stands for the communication of anyTHING with another device via the Internet through a cloud-based data storage provider for the purpose of sharing information without the optional requirement of any human intervention.

Ubiquitous computing and smart sensor technologies have advanced so much recently in combination with technologies like Cloud Computing and cyber-physical systems that the 1980s dream of a ‘Smart Factory’ has been resurrected. Many manufacturing firms are already planning their strategy and investing to move towards Germany’s “Industry 4.0” initiative otherwise known as the 4th Industrial Revolution. The 1st Industrial Revolution was the mechanisation of production using steam and water. The 2nd Industrial Revolution introduced mass production with the help of electricity and the 3rd was the digital revolution with the usage of electronics and IT to further automate production as shown in the picture below.

The German government is sponsoring “Industry 4.0”. This is a multi-year strategic initiative that brings together leaders from the public and private sectors as well as from academia to create a plan for applying digital technologies to the German industrial

sector. The government is hoping to expand the traditional core of German industry by leveraging Internet technologies to sell and license machines and plants everywhere.

Not only the German government though is bought on the IoT idea, China has also recently proposed its “Made in China 2025” strategy to promote domestic integration of digital technologies and industrialisation. Apple, Cisco, Wal-Mart, Microsoft, Intel, Samsung, GE as well as many other significant tech companies have currently invested in excess of USD 200 Billion in IoT based technology development. The predicted revenues, to become generated by this technology over the next five years, will exceed those generated by the internet and smartphones together by a factor of eight. Subsequently, the reward for pursuing a participation in IoT based technologies is too big to ignore for a lot of companies worldwide. The economics will be the driving force behind the implementations of these technologies and if our estimations are correct there is no doubt that IoT is here to stay.

HOW WILL IOT CHANGE THE MANUFACTURING LANDSCAPE?

IoT technologies will cause mass disruption in the manufacturing landscape. Many changes will stem from their adoption, some of which we have attempted to capture below:

• One of the most obvious opportunities of IoT lies in operational efficiency and productivity gains. These technologies will enable for better asset utilisation, operational cost reduction and increased worker productivity. OEE (Overall Equipment Effectiveness), a concept introduced in 1982, is a KPI percentage calculation that uses equipment availability, productivity, and quality metrics to arrive at a number that summarises how well a piece of equipment or production line is operating. It has resurfaced and is a hot trend in the roll based industries as instrumentation and analytics is a key enabler which allows for more accurate metrics of equipment performance, better monitoring of production line quality and improved maintenance planning.

• In the long term, industry verticals and shared relationships will merge with customers, partners and data. Target outcomes might relate to the operations or maintenance of a product (e.g. reliability), or to the savings generated from the use of a product or piece of equipment. There will be a shift from selling products or services to selling measurable outcomes that will redefine the base of competition and industry structures. New business models around products-as-a-service, pay-per-use models and monetisation of data will also emerge.

• Increase in automation will take over lower-wage and lower-skilled jobs that are repetitive and unsafe for humans. The required education level will rise and necessary skillsets will shift. Demand for higher- skilled and higher-wage resources will increase. There will be a heightened need for engineers to develop robots and for data scientists and managers to analyse data and draw insight.

The image above from the World Economic

Forum Industrial Internet project attempts to identify enablers and inhibitors of the Industrial Internet along with key opportunities and disruptions.

IOT ESSENTIAL TECHNOLOGIES FOR MANUFACTURING

There are many new technologies which fall under the IoT umbrella, however a wide range of conventional IT technologies will be used to materialise it. Below are some new technologies which seem to be on every organisation’s radar and can be marked as key enablers:

• Real Time, Big Data Analytics: The information collected by all IoT “things” will populate huge volumes of data, creating problems of scale. Machine learning to identify patterns has already seen massive investments from huge technology vendors like Facebook and Google and will be used for this purpose. The traditional approach of obtaining data, storing and then processing and analysing will

not work. Real time analysis of data streams is needed. New tools such as high-volume event stream platforms, the ability to operate on new data types and new architectures where analytics is distributed throughout the network of things will be created. Examples of such technologies include: Apache Storm, Apache Spark, Google Cloud Dataflow and IBM InfoSphere Streams. Data privacy and acceptable use will become major challenges. For example, is the data from a normalisation furnace the property of the plant owner or the machine manufacturer?

• Device Management: Management and monitoring will be required for all smart sensors (“things”) to find out if they are alive and/or connected, checking software and firmware updates, reporting, etc. Platforms managing and monitoring thousands of connected devices over Wi-Fi or cellular networks will be needed. Vendors selling tools derived from Mobile Data Management (i.e. Android) who seem to be able to bridge this gap which exists for IoT devices lack features or related pricing models. There is not a platform satisfying all foreseen needs, manufacturers employing IoT technologies may have to change platforms during the lifetime of long-life products.

• Low-Power, Short-Range Networks: The IoT implies many more objects will be using wireless networks, which could create noise and interference issues. Network designers must consider the impact of new wireless products on existing services such as Wi-Fi. Networks need to be of low bandwidth and high connection density because of the increased number of devices which will be connected to the network. IoT networking technologies will be focused on short range (tens to hundreds of meters), long battery life (years), relatively low bandwidth, low endpoint cost and medium to high density (hundreds of adjacent devices). Current technologies include ZigBee, Bluetooth, Zwave/G.9959, Thread, Ant and Wi-Fi. Maybe the future will lead to environments requiring gateways to convert between wireless protocols and devices, no single standard will prevail.

• Processors: The processors and architectures used by IoT devices will define many of their capabilities. Such as whether they are capable of strong security and encryption, power consumption, whether they are sophisticated enough to support an operating system, updatable firmware, and have embedded device management. Gartner predicts that low-end, 8-bit microcontrollers will dominate the IoT through 2019 at least, which implies that many IoT devices will be extremely simple and incapable of running an operating system or performing sophisticated functions such as encryption unless built in as a chip hardware feature.

• Operating Systems: The traditional operating systems consume too much power, need fast processors and too much memory for IoT devices of the future. Guaranteed real-time responses is something that these operating systems do not have, but will be in future demand. This will affect the programming models and development tools. Embedded operating systems will emerge, probably from open-source projects but at the moment it looks like there will be a wide range of IoT operating systems in the future.

WHY IS SECURITY IMPORTANT AND THE KEY INHIBITOR OF IOT?

IoT introduces a wide range of new security risks and challenges to the IoT devices themselves, their platforms and operating systems, their communications, and even the systems to which they’re connected. In the future, all these “things” will be connected together either in a local network or over the Internet making autonomous decisions. We will no longer have “things” with embedded computers, we will have “things” attached to computers. The Internet will no longer be a web that we connect to, instead, it will be a computerised, networked, and interconnected world that we live in, it will blend much more into real life.

Threats in such a networked enterprise will come in all forms, computer viruses that delete important data. Ransomware that encrypts data and demands payment for the unlock key. Manipulation of calibration data for important equipment on the shop floor to make it not work or produce sub optimal quality material. We do not want the PLC controlling the winder machine in a paper plant to suddenly decide that cutting in equal widths is a constraint it has to satisfy. The security on the internet is based on a best-effort approach. This is why there have been so many examples of hacker attacks on either websites or machinery like routers taking them out of service and causing issues to organisations or people depending on them. This issue gets more complicated because the IoT devices will be mostly based on simple processors having a low memory footprint and operating systems which may not even support sophisticated security approaches.

Most of the software is badly written with lots of defects in terms of security. At the moment, we don’t mind if our games crash regularly, or our business applications act weird once in a while. Security for computers or smartphones are as secure as they are because Google, Microsoft and Apple spend a lot of time testing their code before it is released and quickly patch vulnerabilities when they are discovered. Connecting everything to each other via the Internet will bring benefits discussed above but also expose new vulnerabilities. Critical applications like software managing the equipment which runs the shop floor of a manufacturing plant will not be accepted with the current security standards.

Security technologies will be required to evolve and be able to protect IoT devices and platforms from both information attacks and physical tampering. To encrypt their communications and to address new challenges such as impersonating “things” or denial-ofsleep attacks that drain batteries. We have not seen any major breakthroughs in security technologies during the last few years to ensure that the required standards will be met, this is the reason security is the key inhibitor. We do not think there is an easy fix as neither the

owners nor the buyer of the “things” seem to care much about security at the moment. Their devices were cheap to buy, they work, and they don’t know any of the victims of the attacks unless their own device has been hacked.

The sellers of those devices don’t care: They’re now selling newer and better models. The original buyers only cared about price and features. This is not an issue that the current market of smart equipment can fix, other solutions will be needed. Perhaps government and law policies can force the manufacturers to improve the quality of security or connect everything limiting the network locally instead of using the cloud and Internet will limit the hackers’ advantage. One thing is clear, as long as there is not a change in this area then a limited number of organisations will make the leap forward to IoT technologies.

HOW DOES IOT AFFECT THE DESIGN OF APPLICATIONS FOR THE SHOP FLOOR?

We discussed above about the ability of devices on the shop floor making quick and smart decisions based on the data they constantly acquire whilst also communicating with each other. Does it mean that each of these devices will be able to digest and process the information on its own – then communicate directly with ERP? Does this lead to a flat organisation where all devices are on one level and ERP on top, orchestrating the production? After all, this would improve the decision making and cutting the time it takes for executive level intentions to reach and be executed by people on the lower levels. Our estimation is that the technology is not yet ready for selfautonomous and self-directed cells (“things”) sending meaningful aggregated messages to ERP without exceeding the required volume and eliminating the useless information in each message. We think that, it does not make sense to have the devices talk directly to ERP, or even talk among themselves, just because it is possible. Our personal opinion is that the right model is the ISA 95 and Data Bus concept – a simplified view of which can be seen at left on the facing page:

In this model, we have the Data Bus, and the devices are not talking directly with each other. The devices are talking to Data Bus and this is where the logic is setup. This allows meaningful data to flow among the different devices horizontally, but also to have the right aggregation level for the vertical flow. Enabling only meaningful information to reach higher levels of the information hierarchy.

We do not see the architecture of the “Levels” changing much soon, however we expect the agility of the shop floor to greatly improve. We expect software in Level 4 (Advanced Planning Solutions) and Level 3 (Manufacturing Execution Systems) to upgrade and become even more important. Information will need to travel much faster across both directions, top to bottom and vice versa. The customer intentions will be recorded and travel across the supply chain much faster than they do today. Companies looking to move forward with these technologies will benefit from the ability to shift production targets. This will cater for the fast-changing customer requirements without decreasing output quality. Without understanding how and where IoT applications can create a benefit for customers or the technological conditions that must be created and maintained, organisations in the roll industries will be left behind in a market where lowering costs is crucial for survival. Nimble and issue free communication of the production plan from APS to MES will be needed. Low volume of quality defects and stoppages of equipment needs to work with a higher OEE than today. MES communicating with APS on defective production in order to replan and send the new plan to production. These are some of the qualities required. Greycon believe that our award-winning planning software opt-Studio and X Trim integrate seamlessly with our MES, Greycon Mill, allowing for the above functionalities and are constantly revamped to match the needs of the changing future.

CONCLUSION

IoT deployment demands a wide range of new technologies and skills that many organisations have yet to master. It is still a very immature domain where product and technology categories aren’t yet clearly established. Many software vendors claim that they provide IoT solutions but none of them yet fully covers the new key technology areas which seem to emerge. Architecting for this immaturity, and managing the risk it creates, will be a key challenge for organisations exploiting the technology. Companies needing solutions in the short term can’t afford to wait until IoT is mature, so managing vendor and technology risk will be vital to successful IoT implementations.

Key principles will include architecting for change. For example: Modularising designs or layering so that software and even hardware technologies can be replaced when superior options emerge. Some “things” may be old, allowing attackers many years to find vulnerabilities. Security strategies and technologies must be flexible and able to evolve as new threats develop during a product’s lifetime. New approaches and technologies need to emerge and provide new types of solutions to convince manufacturing organisations to take the leap forward. At Greycon we are continuously investing in new research to further enhance our proven solutions.