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A Communication Gap in theInternet of Things

As new groups touting nextgeneration manufacturing sprout uparound the world, the automationindustry scrambles to createcommon communication standardsto enable interoperability betweenplant floor systems and the Internetof Things.

By Stephanie Neil, Automation World Contributing Writer

In an effort to become one of the most responsible food companies on the planet, General Mills

has embarked upon a massive global mission to make more nutritious products, reduce the

company’s environmental footprint, and increase the safety and sustainability of key

ingredients.

There are many moving parts in the overall plan, but one project underway has the IT and

manufacturing team working to stitch together the supply chain from field to fork—that is, “the

flow of information and attributes of the ingredient from the farm to manufacturing to its

transformation into a finished product and onto the grocery shelves,” says Jim Wetzel,

technical director at General Mills.

Given the proliferation of sensors and devices that

populate the evergrowing collection of smart objects,

known as the Internet of Things (IoT), one might think

gathering information from outside of the enterprise is

easy to do. But that’s not the case, especially when

trying to keep data integrity intact while interfacing with

myriad external systems. But Wetzel, who is also chair

of the Smart Manufacturing Leadership Coalition

(SMLC)—a nonprofit organization comprised of

manufacturers, technology companies, academia, and

U.S. government agencies and laboratories—is leading

another important mission: Solve the underlying

interoperability issues across the manufacturing value

chain.

SMLC is developing an open, ubiquitous manufacturing

platform that, according to Wetzel, can be fully

integrated—and knowledgeenabled—to meet cross

industry businesscase objectives. “We are looking for

an architecture that is not an Internet of Things, but an

Internet of Manufacturing that allows solutions to be

connected and applied,” he says.

6

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Standards andProtocols for theIndustrial Internet

of Things

ADVERTISEMENT

SMLC is not alone in its efforts to create a smarter

manufacturing ecosystem. There are many groups

forming, from the Industrial Internet Consortium (IIC,

with founders AT&T, Cisco, General Electric, IBM and

Intel) to the AllSeen Alliance (a Linux Foundation

collaborative project) to the German government

inspired Industry 4.0 initiative. Each group has a slightly

different approach, but all have the goal of advancing manufacturing by taking advantage of the

global IoT market, which, according to International Data Corp., will grow from $1.9 trillion in

2013 to $7.1 trillion by 2020.

Pilot projects and test beds are underway to prove the viability of each group’s respective

reference architecture, and to create a connective framework that closes the loop between

industrial automation and the enterprise. In the big picture, all have an eye on improving global

operations, increasing competiveness, and even creating jobs by making it easier to set up

local manufacturing sites.

In addition, the productivity benefits of smart manufacturing directly relate to decreased

downtime and increased agility. “In today’s world, an almond farmer will fax us a document with

product testing attributes, such as moisture, weight, taste, and that becomes our certificate of

analysis, which we put in a file cabinet,” Wetzel says. “In tomorrow’s world of smart

manufacturing, we run the fax through OCR [optical character recognition] technology, store

the data in the Cloud and push it into the MES [manufacturing execution system] so that the

system knows the [product] properties and adjusts the recipe of production accordingly.”

Of course, having this level of interoperability requires extracting data

from control systems that traditionally operate in a closed loop inside the

plant. So while SMLC and other industry groups work on open, flexible

frameworks, the automation community is addressing the communication issues, which,

hopefully, will result in industrial IoT standards.

When it comes to passing information from the control system to the Cloud, “we want to do it in

a standard way,” says Mike Bryant, executive director of PI North America and administrative

director for the OPC Foundation. There needs to be a common language, and “that piece is

lacking right now.”

Developing the lingua franca of Industrial IoT

Enabling interoperability across such a large landscape requires a twopronged approach that

looks at the enterprise from the Cloud down and at manufacturing from the controllers up. “We

are hitting it from both ends,” says Wesley Skeffington, principal engineer at GE Global

Research’s RealTime Embedded Systems Laboratory. GE has developed a software

platform, called Predix, which can connect industrial assets with the Cloud. In addition, the

company is working to embed knowledge into controllers so that they know what to do when a

piece of information is received.

The key here is context.

“Besides basic interoperability, you have to get the boxes to talk the same language to make

use of the data,” Skeffington says. And, for that, the industry needs new semantic standards.

“Semantic interoperability happens by embedding context, so as the data aggregates up

through the systems, you are not trying to find the Modbus register list to identify what the heck

the data is.”

To that end, the OPC Foundation, the group responsible for developing and maintaining OPC

UA, an open platform interoperability standard for industrial automation, is working to figure out

what that IoT syntax model looks like. More importantly, the effort underway by the OPC

Foundation and others is focused on leveraging existing automation standards so that

manufacturers are not reinventing the wheel.

In addition to OPC UA, there are many network, fieldbus and machine communication

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4/8/2015 A Communication Gap in the Internet of Things | Automation World

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protocols and standards that provide interoperability on the plant floor. And that, industry

experts say, is providing a solid foundation for IoT.

“The goal of Industry 4.0 is not to [move everything into the] IT world, it is to make machines

more efficient and easier to maintain,” says Peter Fischbach, automation industry sector

manager at Bosch Rexroth. To that end, the company’s Open Core Engineering product

connects the worlds of PLC and IT via open standards, function toolkits and an interface

supporting numerous programming languages to enable the integration of smart devices and

automation systems. “The basic architecture of a PLC doesn’t need to be changed, but the

way the data is exchanged does have to change.”

In other words, the key to the next industrial revolution—in which big machines and Big Data

merge across the Internet—is to combine information with action. More importantly, IT and

automation systems need to speak the same language.

Industrial IoT action—mixed messages?

There are companies that already have technology solutions to tie together factory floor

systems with the enterprise. In addition to Bosch Rexroth, Kepware Technologies and Opto 22

are working to ease the programming pain of connecting heterogeneous devices and machines

to enterprise systems, either directly or through the Cloud.

Unfortunately, many manufacturing managers, including Benoit Lapensee, MES coordinator at

Cascades Inc., a packaging and tissue paper company in Quebec, Canada, are still not sold

on the idea of interoperability outside of the plant floor. Cascades, which has many locations

throughout North America, has acquired a variety of equipment and plant floor software as a

result of acquisitions. Inside the secure company wide area network (WAN), Lapensee links

the different production systems to the company’s central MES, which is GE’s Proficy, using

Kepware’s KEPServerEX, a communications platform that connects with a variety of device

interfaces, including OPC and proprietary protocols.

It’s a oneway collection of data from the PLC to Kepware and then to the historian and MES

for calculations on OEE and downtime. Data is then compiled into reports for supervisors and

executives to see the status of operations around the world.

Kepware, through a recent alliance with operational intelligence provider Splunk Inc., has the

ability to help Cascades extract even more meaningful information from the industrial data

pulled out of sensors, devices and control systems. Through Kepware’s Industrial Data

Forwarder (IDF) for Splunk, all of that information can be sent to the Cloud to apply Big Data

analytics, providing realtime insights into operations.

But Lapensee is cautious when it comes to production data. “Every day my challenge is to

build new reports based on data from different devices, but we are not yet to the point where

we want to transfer data from one machine to another,” or outside of the organization, he says.

“My concern is related to the control of the process. Doing something remotely could result in a

safety issue.”

Indeed, many manufacturers are not willing to test new technology at the expense of their

manufacturing processes. But Opto 22’s Benson Hougland says security shouldn’t be a

concern. Companies like Google, Apple and Facebook have built their businesses on IT

technology, and most people are comfortable enough to do their banking online. Of course,

communication on the Internet is very different than the factory floor. It is done via Hypertext

Transfer Protocol (HTTP) and information can be pulled into a “mashup” of applications via

Representational State Transfer (REST) APIs.

This has led Opto 22 to take a slightly different stand when it comes to Industrial IoT. The

company has turned to existing Internet architectures, like REST, for its new product called

groov. Layered on top of Opto 22’s SNAP PAC System for industrial control, groov provides a

way to create actionable views of different data sources. Dragging and dropping an icon from a

web browser can present field device information on a mobile or desktop system.

“On the back end of groov, we are talking to OPC UA or Modbus TCP,” Hougland says. “In the

4/8/2015 A Communication Gap in the Internet of Things | Automation World

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future, when the Internet of Things takes off and the standardized way to communicate is in a

RESTful way, groov will speak to those devices as well.” Imagine, he says, if you could

quickly assimilate plant floor data with energy usage and even weather patterns mashed up to

create a more valuable bigpicture view.

Though Hougland is betting on REST and HTTP for the future, there are many methods

emerging to connect machines on the factory floor and the Internet of Things.

“There are different groups creating different standards, and they all say their standard is the

best,” says Erik Dellinger, product manager at Kepware. “But I don’t know if it will ever happen

that one will rule them all.”

There will likely be a handful of standards that will play together in the IoT sandbox. But one

thing seems clear: OPC UA will be in that sandbox, too.

What lies beneath IoT

SMLC’s Wetzel is working on a framework that sits on top of existing industrial automation

investments. “We start with the data, and our mission is to act on the data,” he says. But how

does that data get from sensors and other smart devices to a PLC or a historian to populate

the smart manufacturing platform? “We’re not working on that.”

That falls under the OPC Foundation, which is tasked with creating a “dream team” of industry

experts from the vendor and end user community, which will put all the pieces of the IoT

interoperability puzzle together—from the physical network infrastructure to the fieldbus to the

industrial network and out to the Cloud.

“The challenge is how to share data across all of the different levels and still have meaningful

information,” says Carlos Pazos, product marketing manager at National Instruments.

“And, from a Profinet and OPC perspective, I’m trying to figure out what will be required of me

in the next five years,” says PI North America’s Bryant. “What the control systems will need to

provide, and what formats and speed. These are the things I’m constantly thinking about

because I don’t want anyone to come back to me and say I have to change formats around, it’s

not going to work.”

In addition, there are real concerns that an influx of information generated by a multitude of new

smart devices populating a network could stress the infrastructure. “I’m not concerned about

the speed of Ethernet; we have a lot of headroom regarding the performance of the network,”

says Fluke Networks CTO David Coffin. “But we need to ensure the reliability of connecting up

a sensor in a harsh environment.” For example, mechanical, ingress, chemical/climatic and

electromagnetic conditions could impact wireless network performance.

Kepware’s Dellinger concurs that the network, including bandwidth, needs to factor into the

overall equation. “There is an effort within Kepware to move closer to the edge,” including the

millions of sensors in the field, Dellinger says. “But all of those devices can’t be communicating

back to an app like Splunk at the same time, so there needs to be a middle layer that

aggregates communication and manages network bandwidth.”

These are all things that need to be taken into account, which is why creating this next

generation manufacturing model could take years.

“Right now there is a lot of hype around IoT,” says Tom Burke, president and executive

director of the OPC Foundation. “Everyone is talking about the fact that we will be able to get at

data that we couldn’t get to before, but then what do we do with it?”

With some of the work the OPC Foundation has already done in oil and gas and other

industries, the group is working on creating a set of industryspecific objects that describes

data information—like a device library that sits in the Cloud. This is part of the semantic

standardization effort underway to ensure all parties speak the same language.

Though this is just one small part of the overall IoT architecture, a setup such as this could

make it very easy to hand off data to a smart manufacturing, Internet 4.0 or industrial Internet

4/8/2015 A Communication Gap in the Internet of Things | Automation World

http://www.automationworld.com/industrialinternetthings/communicationgapinternetthings 5/6

COMPANIES IN THIS ARTICLE: PI North America, Bosch Rexroth, Kepware Technologies,

Opto22, National Instruments, Fluke, OPC Foundation

FILED IN: Industrial Internet of Things, Communication Protocols/Standards

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framework.

But all of this is still in the early stages of development, and how this will evolve is still a

mystery.

“It’s like trying to predict what the Internet would be like in 1985,” says Skeffington. “No one

[back then] could have predicted what it would become.”

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