Now that we’ve sorted out fieldbus and launched industrial Ethernet, what’s next? This was a typical question I heard while attending a trade organization event in 2012. At the time, no one could offer an answer. However, in the past few years, use of the Internet by industry has risen dramatically. So, is the Internet of Things (IoT) the answer to what’s next?
IoT remains characterized by much blue-sky thinking. Internet Protocol v6 appears to offer almost limitless monitoring, which leads us to terms like “ubiquitous connectivity,” “systems of systems,” and even the “global digital brain.” Big Data and the Cloud, together with as yet undefined analytical technologies, are key elements of IoT as well.
综上所述,收集和的概念using data is not new in automation. Anyone with a SCADA historian package has been doing it for years. Predictive maintenance has been around for decades. Online troubleshooting is the norm today. So what’s new about industrial IoT?
当然，规模是一个答案。如果我可以将我的工厂中的每个传感器（等等）连接到天空中的一些伟大的存储设施，并使其在我的运营中提供深刻的新视线，然后我的世界肯定会成为一个更好的地方。但只是因为我们可以向云发送大规模的数据流并不意味着我们应该。
For me, data accumulated in the Cloud should somehow be assimilated and condensed into context before being applied back to our plants. Store the raw data if you must, but surely a pseudo-intelligent agent needs to be at work here, seeking understanding. And distributing that around my plant makes more sense than gathering colossal quantities of bits.
随着IOT标准和网络贸易组织的大型工业集团和组织，试图在为其网络指定解决方案之前定义需求，现实是网络将在无论IOT变为核心。我们今天使用的网络不会消失，但您可以期待升级和添加。毕竟，这一天是在一天的一天发生，安全和能源管理是驾驶增长的应用程序的主要例子。
Given this reality, we are responding already, as evidenced by the latest addition to Hilscher’s netX chip family—the netX 4000. I am really excited by netX 4000 because, rather than just supporting our traditional protocol conversion technologies, it’s a “system-on-a-chip” and that has a direct bearing on IoT and our company’s future.
It has multiple processors and peripherals to run applications using different operating systems as well as supporting popular protocols. Therefore, it opens up rich new opportunities in embedded control. It also addresses the “elephant in the room”—security.
Plant-wide layered security will always be necessary, but netX 4000 will have the capability to deliver hardware-based protection at the exact point of control, and that’s a very tough barrier for intruders to overcome, even if they’ve evaded the other security measures.
netX 4000 security achieves asymmetric protection based on public and private cipher keys, with a hardware crypto-accelerator as a security guarantee. As with many other aspects of IoT, it draws on proven technologies from the commercial world so we confidently expect to meet whatever requirements are eventually made by the network trade organizations. The netX 4000 is intended as a PLC master initially, but slaves have to become smarter and more sophisticated too, so expect to see lower-cost versions in due course.
