IIoT Connectivity & Data | Building a Bridge Between Equipment and Applications
Ideally, equipment vendors offer an option to integrate and even remotely control shopfloor equipment via a communication interface. For example, SECS is standard in the semiconductor industry, manufacturing equipment often has an MTConnect interface, and OPC UA and Web Services are more generic examples. However, such options may not be available sometimes or come with prohibitive costs. If the equipment doesn’t provide an adequate communication interface and, therefore, is not integrated within the manufacturing IT landscape, current and historical equipment data is lacking.
The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) offers powerful and cost-effective options to upgrade such equipment. With IIoT, it becomes possible to build the equipment’s digital twin – a virtual model representing the physical and functional features of the real machine.
IIoT solutions bridge the gap between manufacturing equipment and IT applications, providing connectivity that would otherwise not be possible. IIoT enables the transmission and processing of a machine’s status (is it up? is it down? is it processing material? etc.) to all relevant manufacturing IT applications. By instrumenting the equipment in question with sensors and/or actuators, its state can be measured and adjusted. These sensors and actuators are connected to a minimalistic industrial computer (IoT Gateway) deployed next to the equipment. The IoT Gateway routes the equipment data to/from other manufacturing IT applications as needed.
Imagine, for example, a standalone machine with internal automation but no communication interface to the outside world. If the operator pushes the start button, the machine would start to process all units that are available at the input port. However, there is no way of automatically tracking the machine status to enable a higher level of automation or optimization. An IIoT solution can close that gap. For example, the green “running” signal light of the machine could be connected to an IoT Gateway’s digital input to measure and report the machine’s productive time. An additional presence sensor at the material input could trigger a warning if material is missing, or enable counting the number of produced units. The gathered data would then be processed by the IoT gateway, ingested into the digital twin model within the IIoT application and made available via an interface meeting the factory IT requirements (e.g. web services, MQTT, Apache Kafka, Azure IoT Hub, TIBCO/RV, or others). Via this interface, an OEE application can easily consume the data to generate statistics and throughput KPIs.
Other use cases include:
- Complementing an existing equipment interface with IIoT: If, for example, an interface doesn’t provide information about the machine’s power consumption. IIoT power sensors may be installed to provide more transparency of the machine's current status. With this additional data, the digital twin of the machine could be enriched to better understand the current equipment status and to enable further optimization.
- Facilitating the transition to “Place-and-Go” processing: Adding sensors and components (for example RFID readers for automatic material identification) to equipment that is already integrated facilitates the transition from manual material identification by the worker to a highly automated place-and-go scenario. Place-and-go capabilities then lay the foundation to enable automated material handling to be done by transport systems, autonomous vehicles and robots.
Leveraging IIoT provides valuable functionality and insights today, while enabling future opportunities to take advantage of advanced automation concepts which will take manufacturing to the next level.
