Today’s utility infrastructure and operations are increasingly autonomous, driven by advances in sensing, computing and internet technology. Likewise for other Smart City infrastructure such as buildings and transport networks, and for manufacturing.
Sensors deployed at strategic points and embedded controllers provide real-time data on the status of production and machinery to optimise operations and to support predictive and preventative maintenance plans.
Welcome to Industry 4.0 and the Industrial Internet of Things.
Predictive Maintenance – maintaining a machine before it breaks down and causes downtime and financial penalty – is a tricky subject. The machine builders themselves are best positioned to understand how their products perform and they will convey this in the form of a Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF) or Mean Time To Failure (MTTF).
This allows users to conduct maintenance periodically at intervals that are less than the MTBF. In an ideal world, this would mean that no failures would ever occur but in the real world it doesn’t really work like that.
As ownership and purchasing attitudes change and companies opt for OPEX rather than CAPEX based models, the onus is firmly on machine builders to incorporate industrial IoT or machine-to-machine (M2M) communication technology to enable them to remotely monitor and manage their products out in the field, be it a robot or cutting machine on a production line, an electricity substation on a suburban street corner or a ventilation system in a factory.
Remote internet access will allow vendors to optimise how they perform against the maintenance plan sold with their products or deliver a purely service-based solution (XaaS). The benefits are compelling:
Arkessa is a Siemens Solutions Partner and together we have created a solution which helps system integrators & machine builders to securely connect to the Industrial Internet. Resilient multi-network 2G, 3G and 4G/LTE M2M communication enables Siemens SCALANCE and RUGGEDCOM routers to connect anywhere on the planet. Read more about the solution and about the benefits of sourcing wireless Industrial IoT connectivity from Arkessa in our whitepaper. You’ll find it in the SOLUTIONS section of our Download page.