Manufacturing a Digital Future: Avoiding the Roadblocks to IIoT
The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) is connecting the entire manufacturing enterprise, from acquiring components to manufacturing, storage and delivery—in short, it’s delivering an enterprise-wide, holistic view of the entire work flow. But traditional networks present a roadblock to deployments in smart factories and connected plants. Two elements are necessary to build smart digital manufacturing: an industrial-grade hardened network, and a real-time alarm and notification system.
When we talk about smart manufacturing, we are really talking about using the IIoT to create a complete digital environment that gathers, exchanges, collates and enables the analysis of real-time data—from the factory floor to the back office and right along the supply chain. Not only will this environment allow manufacturing and industrial processes to become more automated, but it will enable management systems to produce actionable insights across the entire enterprise, resulting in better and faster decision making.
IIoT is not a single technology; it’s a whole raft of new technologies—sensors, new applications, machine-to-machine interfacing, machine learning, predictive analytics, geolocation, wearables and augmented reality. The network infrastructure is what brings all these technologies and solutions together. Without it, you have disparate collections of smart technologies that never achieve their potential.
The manufacturing and industrial sectors have specific network requirements that just wouldn’t be necessary in an office or retail environment. So should the networks be the same? The answer, of course, is no.
Unreliable connectivity on the LAN or WLAN can be a disaster for the highly automated processes in today’s production lines. Even minimal network disruption caused by inefficient data transfer, bottlenecking or data loss can have ramifications along the entire production chain. And not only does patchy wireless connectivity mean mobile assets and workers can’t operate efficiently, it can also be a serious safety risk.
Bringing together controllers, sensors, IP video and wireless-enabled assets on busy manufacturing floors or industrial sites requires a network backbone that can maintain its reliability and quality of service in the face of the heat, dust, electromagnetic interference and vibrations caused by machinery and heavy vehicles. This is why a hardened network based on rugged components is vital to ensuring a reliable and secure manufacturing network, while being able to easily expand the network to incorporate new assets and technologies as they become available.
So how do you build a hardened network to support connected plants and factories? First, the switches, access points and routers must be able to offer the same capability you would find in any other advanced network—embedded security, dynamic network-performance tuning for real-time application delivery and reliable broadband IP connectivity. But this network needs hardware with industrial-grade form factors, hardened to operate in more-extreme conditions.
Outside of protected and climate-controlled data centers, the campus network must be able to handle a much wider range of conditions. Hardened industrial-grade switches, which can operate in environments ranging from –40°C to +75°C, are a crucial element in a network subjected to continuous or fluctuating extreme temperatures.
