Innovative Platform-Based Design for the Industrial Internet of Things

By Andy Chang, Senior Manager, Academic Research National Instruments Corp

Xcell Daily Blog, Jul. 24, 2015 – 

The IoT has the potential to impact our lives profoundly. NI customers play a critical role in inventing, deploying and refining the consumer and industrial products and systems at the center of the IoT, as well as the wired and wireless infrastructure connecting those products and systems together. Spanning well over a decade, the NI and Xilinx technology partnership has provided engineers and scientists with tools to create world-changing innovations. NI has delivered latest generations of Xilinx devices in successive generations of its most advanced products, ranging from NI FlexRIO modules to CompactRIO controllers, as well as NI System on Module (SOM) and myRIO devices. NI takes great pride in its role helping innovators to design, build and test these intelligent devices with integrated software and hardware platforms.

Industrial systems interfacing the digital world to the physical world through sensors and actuators that solve complex control problems are commonly known as cyber-physical systems. These systems are being combined with Big Analog Data solutions to gain deeper insight through data and analytics. Imagine industrial systems that can adjust to their own environments or even their own health. Instead of running to failure, machines schedule their own maintenance or, better yet, adjust their control algorithms dynamically to compensate for a worn part, and then communicate that data to other machines and the people who rely on those machines.

As such, the landscape of the IoT, as shown in Figure 1, can be further segmented into three parts: the intelligent edge (sensor/actuator), the system of systems and end-to-end analytics that support all the connectivity and data analytics while meeting requirements of latency, synchronization and reliability. More often than not, different vendors produce these intelligent products, which have various embedded processors, protocols and software. The integration of these products throughout their design cycles to the final deployment is a key challenge. It will take a platform-based approach to achieve a fully connected world.

 Back