EDGE TO CLOUD INTEGRATION
MAKING EDGE TO CLOUD INTEGRATION PAY Suzanne Gill finds out why it is important to implement plant connectivity from the edge to the cloud to make the best use of data made available thanks to the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT).
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nvestment in Industry 4.0 technologies – with standardsbased platforms supporting edge infrastructure – will enable critical machine and plant data to be monitored and analysed on site, offering better latency for decision making. Meanwhile, the cloud is able to use data provided by the IIoT to support higher analytical performance, especially where multiple plants are uploading data. Industrial enterprises should really be looking to achieve connectivity from the edge to the cloud to allow for fast decision making based on real-time edge data, while also benefitting from higher resilience and secure remote access to mass storage data, reports, updates and notifications, offered by the cloud. Greg Hookings, head of business development – digitalisation at Stratus Technologies, agrees with this need, pointing out that while focusing just on edge computing will give valuable real-time insight into operations on the plant-floor, without linking edge computing to the cloud the benefits of consolidating and processing larger amounts of contextualised data are lost. He said: “Without edge to cloud connectivity, artificial intelligence (AI) and broader digital transformation approaches, that require data from cross-business functions, are lost. “At the other end of the spectrum, a cloud-only approach can reduce efficient management at a local level,” continued Hookings. “While the enterprise would be able to process large amounts of data with information from the entire supply chain, operators at the machine
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level would be reliant on bandwidth and availability to have access to information. Even in areas with high bandwidth, the data collected by machines needs to be sent to the cloud for analysis and so latency becomes a factor – reducing real-time reactivity. In some manufacturing processes such a delay might be enough to lose an entire batch, or bring production to a halt.” Bringing these two disciplines together in a combined solution means that, at the machine level, operators have all the information they need as soon as they need it and large amounts of non-time critical data can be sent to the cloud for analysis. “What this creates is an enterprise with a global, contextualised understanding of its processes and an enabled, flexible, agile workforce, equipped to overcome challenges in real-time,” said Hookings.
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Taking steps Slawomir Dziedziula, technical systems engineer at Panduit EMEA, believes that there are a number of steps that will ensure successful data flow from the edge to the cloud. These include: • Plan and implement a robust and high-quality physical infrastructure that is suitable for the harsh environmental conditions of the plant. • Design for standardised and normalised data and protocols to ensure data extraction is simplified and consistent. • Support this with stable and redundant network connectivity between edge and the cloud. • Decide what information and tasks will be analysed locally using real time computing. • •Select a suitable analytical platform and deploy policies to decide which data is sent to the cloud. • Create a central point of control and Control Engineering Europe
