The document presents an industrial IoT reference architecture for connecting industrial facilities to the cloud. It includes:
- A breakdown of the common business and technical challenges faced in industrial digital transformation.
- A low-level reference architecture showing how to create a unified OT/IT data backbone integrating edge, cloud, security, data management, applications and insights.
- Examples of how the architecture enables use cases across industries like predictive maintenance, quality control and remote monitoring.
- Recommendations around executing a modern data strategy and taking a holistic approach to maximize insights, minimize technical debt and future-proof the solution.
13. IDP Enabled Use Cases
• Simulation, modeling of plant floor operations
• Reskilling/Upskilling, Worker training
Predictive Maintenance
Digital Twin & AR/VR
Operations Planning
• Real time tracking of high value inventory, WIP stock
• Real-time insights to customers, ETA on goods
• Track assets, equipment and parts out on maintenance
• Shipment tracking
Track and Trace
Defect Tracking/Warranty Claims
Predictive Quality Manufacturing Operations
• Cycle Time Management and monitoring,
automated dashboards
• Identify micro-stoppages
• Track output at each cell, automated dashboards of
production KPIs
• Live dash-boarding of plant floor productivity,
operations
• Baselining Equipment Measurements of ambient
conditions – sound, vibrations, heat levels
• Single pane of glass view in plant floor
• Plant Floor operations, global operations view
• Monitoring of sensors on the factory equipment
• Categorization of faults can be analyzed across
multiple assets, even multiple operators, to spot trends
• Digital Twin of the Equipment/Machinery
• Simulation Models
Plant Control Tower
• Single pane of glass on factory operations
• Remote monitoring of Equipment/Machines – IoT
sensors, vibration, acoustics, video/camera feeds
• Remote monitoring of finished products, product
usage trends, failure prediction, heartbeat
Safety/Accident Prevention
• Detect unsafe conditions for safety of workers
• Computer vision, camera placement on plant floor
• Safety wearables – belts, straps, monitor bending,
unsafe worker movement
• Detect defects early in production run, reduce scrap,
defects at end of production cycle
• Track inventory parts for each batch; detect micro-
stoppages due to faulty parts
• Trace warranty claims to supplier parts
• Reduce warranty claims
• Monitor product output, throughput
• Computer Vision – product quality monitoring
• Product quality variance - Historical analysis based
on product performance data
• Plan work-orders, scheduling, coordinate production
planning, optimized workloads
• Predictive modeling, Predict demand peaks
• AI/ML for work order optimization, reduce change time
• Computer vision, video/camera feeds
• AI/ML based anomaly detection – Sensor,
audio/video, Acoustic data
AI/ML on Plant Floor
Highly visible, impactful, and repeatable across Plants and Enterprise level
Sustainability
• Save energy (electricity, water)
• Reduce carbon footprint
Hello Everyone – Welcome to the session on Breaking down an Industrial IoT reference architecture.
My name is Neel Sendas – I am a Principal Technical Account Manager at AWS. In my role I work an a customer advocate and operational excellence champion for the customer.
I manager the operations of one of the worlds largest manufacturing companies in the world. I am also part of our AWS IoT field community and work closely with your IoT product manager to provide service feedback to our product managers.
Like most legacy industrials, equipment and machines are few decades old with much of the production data produced trapped in these aging machines and customers want to make those machines smart.
The common anecdotes we hear from our customers are:
We are fairly productive most days but some days our operations are chaotic due to machines going down sometime. And when that happens, it takes us long to get to the root cause due to our data lives in silos.
However, we do track most of the essential stuff on paper and some digitally as well.
We may have more capacity but we have no near real-time visibility of what’s happening on the shop-floor such as monitoring OEE (Overall Equipment Effectiveness) in near real-time at plant, line, and all the way down to the machine level or a near real-time view of inventory and supply chain.
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A key characteristic of Industry 4.0 systems is decentralized decision-making (Alan et al., 2015; Mittal et al., 2017), which means that the common hierarchical layout of shop floor IT needs to change.
The idea is that every entity of the system becomes more autonomous with the ability to communicate directly with any other part of the system.
If we sum up all our customer learnings thus far, these are the common use cases that IDP enables. There is a lot of talk about these but let me touch on the key ones.
Most customers would like to start at predictive equipment maintenance that reduces if not eliminates unscheduled downtimes of key equipment and machines and hence able to bring productivity KPI up such as overall equipment effectiveness (OEE) that most manufacturers struggle to get to 85% being north star. One of the key findings from predictive maintenance engagements is that customers actually don’t have their data in the right place to see a predictive maintenance outcome and once they are successful, they also want to scale the solution immediately across plants and hence, the unified data backbone is critical as you work backwards.
Sustainability is at the top of the mind for every Customer across the board. Simple outcomes such as saving energy (electricity and water) are simple to implement in weeks by increasing actionable visibility to the data. Complex use cases are machine learning based that looks at years of historical data and apply advanced techniques to reduce carbon footprint by providing prescriptive recommendations.
Automated quality / defect management with near real-time visibility and root cause analysis to improve and eventually predict quality issues is the goal of every manufacturer. Within process manufacturing space, monitoring key process parameters that can affect product quality with actionable alerts/notifications is one of the common yet simple use cases that can save millions of $ by reducing scrap and warranty claims.
Another common customer ask is to be able to monitor operations across all of their plants / sites in near real-time using a single pane of glass view with standardized virtual assets across plants while physical assets can continue to be the way they are setup. This helps them to compare and contrast the plants that are doing well vs that are not. In reality, no 2 plants run the same way, so this is one such outcome that is becoming a reality for lot of these customers due to unlimited cloud scale and managed services.
Advanced customers want to build a Digital Twin about their physical assets and processes virtually to help with remote monitoring as an example so that a physical inspection is not required by an OT person. Advanced customers are looking to perform what-if analysis using physics based simulation before rolling out a new set of setpoints for an equipment or process in production.