Industrial Internet of Things supporting Factory Automation

The German initiative Industrie 4.0 aims at realizing challenging visions of efficient and flexible engineering and production value chains covering the entire product life cycle. Industrie 4.0 exploits innovative and emerging technologies such as networked cyber-physical systems (CPS) and smart (big) data analytics. It is commonly expected that the application of these technologies will have disruptive and decisive effects on many business levels. New businessmodels are expected to change industrial production in such a way that it may finally (and possibly retrospectively) be called the 4th industrial revolution. However, most members of the Industrie 4.0 community think in terms of decades rather than years as to when the full vision will become state-of-the-art. Looking at methodological approaches and technologies, Industrie 4.0 must be considered in the broader context of the emerging Industrial Internet. The Industrial Internet Reference Architecture (IIRA) as specified by the Industrial Internet Consortium (IIC) describes the Industrial Internet as an “Internet of things, machines, computers and people, enabling intelligent industrial operations using advanced data analytics for transformational business outcomes”. Industrial Internet systems cover multiple application domains, e.g. energy, healthcare, manufacturing, public sector, transportation and related industrial systems. The IIRA requires that they “mustbe easily understandable and supported by widely applicable, standardbased, open and horizontal architecture frameworks and reference architectures that can be implemented with interoperable and interchangeable building blocks”. Industrie 4.0 basically complies with these objectives but focuses on industrial production and factory automation.