Industrial Internet

Industrial Internet

Industrial Internet

Industrial internet...sounds as if the internet for industrial units only or internet running in a factory environment where large machines are running...its somewhere near to it only. This is a term that has been given to the new concept of Internet utilization by machines not humans. Till now, INTERNET has been used by humans majorly for developing new applications, searching, blogging, creating something new, reading new data ..and many other things..

            However, as these usage of internet increased to a greater level , and have evolved to a bigger phase, and gave rise to many new technologies and better infrastructure with best computing facilities at very small rate, so has brought the demand for more precise and accurate details from each process that we were running since long time to help in reducing the cost and increase the efficiency of these products. This is the time, when the concentration on utilizing our technical capabilities can bring a great impact to human kind benefits. As the whole system around the machines have already evolved, so it will be right time to find the real capacity through the help of Big Data, predictive analytic s and cloud computing in the Industrial internet network, which can reduce the wastage and provide correct/real time information to decision makers for best decisions. This association of machine with internet has been referred as Industrial Internet.

            An example of this which i read and felt about sharing is of Union Pacific, North America's premier railroad franchise who can now predict about its derailments days or weeks in advance before they are likely to occur by taking 20 million readings a day to predict when a wheel is at risk of failing. The audio and visual sensors, infrared thermometers, ultrasound scanners installed underside of each rail car and alongside the rail track helps analyzing the data. These sensors checked every train passing through, and send the reading to railroads data center through fiber optics. At the data center, the pattern matching software identifies those equipments which are near to failure. Although these sensors were there for long time, may be a decade or more, but that could only help the engineers to find the small issues related with the wheels and tracks. Now, with the usage of predictive analytics, the company aims to zeroed on the critical conditions well in advance before the actual problem comes up.

                The overall investment/utilization and results and view of the industrial internet is so big, that it is not easy right now for any small company to start implementing that. Big corporations like GE have made suitable plans in their visions for 20 years, to setup the industrial internet, and utilize it effectively.

GE is planning to invest around $1 Billion in industrial internet, and is gearing up for hitting the challenges through the use of these technologies by hiring around 400 engineers for their San Ramon center. The aim of this project is to develop digital tools to analyze millions of gigabytes of data generated by machines regularly and estimates that there will be an increase of $15 trillion in global GDP by year 2030 due to trimming in cost and reduction in wastage’s.

              GE Transportation estimates that 2.5% of rail operations costs – about $5.6 billion per year globally — are the result of system inefficiencies, whether it’s a derailment or waste in fleet scheduling.

Doesn’t this give a feel like a science fiction,where the parts of machinery are talking about themselves, and mentioning about their statuses. This is already in use by some of the big corporations, and though it may sound like a science fiction, but now we can say that it is really happening. Also, this is about getting the right,instead of just probability.

             As this is an initial phase of industrial internetization, so i am waiting to explore more about it, and wish that similar to the way we save ourselves from internet attacks, there would be a proper way to avoid the internet attacks on industrial internet. I believe that in the coming period, the origin of industrial

internet is going to provide a great impact on our lifelines.

Feedbacks and suggestions are welcome at ashish.tiwari@yahoo.co.in twitter handler : ashishtiwari_