You should now understand some of the common use cases in agribusiness, alternative energy and environmental controls, construction, logistics and transportation, oil and gas, pharmaceuticals, medical equipment and healthcare, and utility companies, and have an even greater depth of understanding of architectures and use cases in manufacturing and CPGs, including the manufacturing test bed, factory operations, visibility and intelligence, and omnichannel initiatives. You should also understand some of the use cases that cross many industries, including predictive maintenance, asset tracking and handling, and environmental impact and abatement IIoT initiatives.
While each scenario is unique, the building blocks of IIoT solutions, such as the sensors, gateway devices, connectivity, and backend platforms, apply in these use cases. Hence, it is crucial to architect the solution using sound principles that will enable future extensibility into new use cases.
Many of the architecture diagrams and solutions presented in this chapter were based on the familiarity the authors have with certain of these solutions. However, you'll find a wide variety of emerging platforms as we'll describe in the next chapter. Though the focus of much of the material here was on use cases, rapid IIoT adoption and deployment ensures that there will be many more case studies also appearing in the future documenting the business gains companies are achieving (once they are less concerned about sharing details of the competitive advantages they are gaining).
It should also be increasingly clear to you from some of these descriptions that building Industrial Internet solutions is a team sport. Testbeds are reference solutions developed collaboratively by groups of companies highlighting the power of the ecosystem. Beyond the formal process promoted by various consortia, tactical building of solutions is occurring, driven by businesses with vision partnering with technology vendors, solutions providers, and systems integrators.
These efforts are helping to achieve the following goals:
- Improve the overall experience level, both technical and domain knowledge
- Reduce risk by distributing it among various parties whose increased skills improve the ability to mitigate concerns and challenges
- Accelerate adoption through increased evangelism, global awareness, and proven success
In the next chapter, we'll present a vision of the future. We'll pick up where we leave off here, discussing the importance of these emerging frameworks and applications. However, we'll also describe the edge device and network evolution, the evolution in human machine interfaces that is occurring, the impact all of this will have on robotics, and more distant technologies that will be incorporated, such as blockchain and quantum computing.