Engineering the Internet of Things: Industrial Equipment

The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) is changing the way the world designs, connects and optimizes machines. The advent of the IIoT brings together the things of the industrial sector (countless pieces of industrial equipment, machines, production facilities, plants), with a network (high speed routers, switches and gateways), and the cloud, which hosts the software and analytics for making decisions based on data from the things. In effect, the IIoT is connecting IT, product design and operational technologies. And this is just the beginning. In a recent blog for Forbes, a team from Trefis wrote, “By 2020, the total technology spend on the industrial Internet is estimated to reach $514 billion, and the value created by the industrial Internet is estimated to rise to nearly $1.3 trillion, which translates to a return on investment of around 150 percent.” Figure 1 shows that early adoption of the IIoT by manufacturers has led to improvement in the overall production process, accelerated transformation through use of industrial automation and robotics, and is expected to have impressive continued growth for the rest of this decade.