I don’t like the Internet of Things!* In our world, the things are different – very different. In the Internet of Things, “things” are toasters, coffee pots, and refrigerators. In the Industrial Internet of Things, “things” are machines, IO, and controllers that make toasters, coffee pots, and refrigerators. So I will always say the Industrial Internet of Things when talking about our world – the industrial world.
IoT is for consumers; IIoT is for engineers.
I frankly don’t care if my milk carton ever tells my refrigerator that it’s running low so the refrigerator can add milk to my grocery list on my smart phone.
I DO care that that a valve is nearing the point of needing serviced. My PROFINET controller knows how many times it has actuated, so alerts a maintenance person on their smart phone. The valve will be serviced during the next scheduled downtime.
I DO care when somewhere on the production line a PROFINET cable breaks. Since I have a redundant ring topology, the line continues to run. But an alert is sent to the maintenance person’s smart phone with details of where the break occurred.
I used to draw IIoT as a subset of IoT, but now I think that is wrong. IIoT and IoT are two different worlds. Although both are built on connected things, the things are too different for one to be a subset of the other.
IoT needs some standards; IIoT has PROFINET and OPC UA standards.
The way it is:
–Carl Henning
*Call this Carl’s pet peeve number 4