A Cookbook for Building Manufacturing IoT Environments

By Tom Nolle

The industrial sector has, for a century, worked to make the conversion of material or parts into products more efficient.

It’s no surprise that the manufacturing sector is a leader in IoT adoption, but many manufacturers still struggle with how to  introduce and use IoT in operations.

For those who do, here’s a simple recipe to build manufacturing IoT environments and to help you along the way.  In this discussion, we’ll use the term “sensor” for IoT devices that report a condition, “effector” for the class of IoT devices intended to move or open something, and “controller” for an IoT device that connects and interacts with sensors and effectors.

A High-Level View of IoT Environments

Companies have been striving for IoT and factory floor automation, and some have made significant progress.  The best approach in IIoT is one that divides your IoT project into three distinct layers, like a cake.

This structure enables manufacturers to match IoT devices to manufacturing processes, to knit those processes into a factory workflow, and to integrate that workflow with the business applications that acquire parts and raw materials and sell finished goods.

This three-layer approach enables IoT environment builders to put IoT processes into effect that reflect the goals of the business.

The Ingredients of an IIoT Project

Process layer. Unlike many IoT applications that build up from sensors that read conditions and “effectors” that move or change things in the real world, manufacturing IoT is usually built from specific processes, each consisting of the tooling needed to perform a manufacturing step, the workers needed to run it, and the IoT devices needed to wrap the process in an automated control envelope. These devices include a local controller, with its own device protocols and programming language, which converts IoT devices into active components of the process itself.  This process layer is the basis for manufacturing IoT design.

Factory edge layer. Manufacturing starts with processes, but all processes must be collected into a cohesive factory vision.  That’s the job of the second layer of the cake, the factory edge layer.  While the process layer is typically built from devices and specialty controllers, the factory edge layer is built from “embedded control” or “edge computing” devices that are increasingly likely to be some kind of general-purpose computing device.  This layer manages the processes so that factory work is passed along in an orderly way, and factory-floor safety of workers and machinery alike is assured.

Business layer. Goods don’t appear or disappear magically from a factory.  Manufacturers have software systems that support the delivery of parts/raw materials, often based on principles like just-in-time (JIT) manufacturing or JIT scheduling of deliveries to minimize inventory.  There are also systems that manage the inventory of finished goods and move them into a sales channel.  These systems form the business layer of the cake, the place where legacy applications meet IoT and process automation.

An IIoT Environment Recipe

Because the process layer is the foundation of IIoT, an optimum strategy starts there:

Now consider the relationship between the process layer and the factory edge layer.  You will need to establish a connection between each factory process in the process layer and an edge computer in the factory edge layer, so there will have to be a commonly supported interface for these connections.

Now to ice the cake.  The business layer of the manufacturing IoT cake is responsible for integration with the applications that handle parts, material, and finished products.  This is also the place where manufacturing IoT leaves the local factory environment, either to connect to the corporate data center or to a public cloud application.

Building IoT Environments Takes Some Finishing Touches

There are a few general rules in IIoT IoT that should be kept in mind when exploring options for all three of the layers of our IoT cake:

Documenting Your IoT Environment

A key rule of thumb is to document everything.  Every decision made, every configuration parameter, every software element or device should be fully documented, with updates made with changes, and reviewed regularly to ensure nothing has been missed.  When you fail to clearly document devices, connections, applications, it can become a likely source of future problems, some of which can be serious.