What is Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT)?

IIoT stands for Industrial Internet of Things and falls under the broader umbrella of IoT.

IIoT is software and hardware (connected industrial electronics, sensors, meters, etc.) working together to collect, analyze and trigger a response in an industrial environment. Responses can be in reaction to a point-in-time event (machine breakdown, min/max thresholds exceeded, etc.) or a response can also be triggered before an event occurs by using predictive data. By using data collected from sensors or meters over time, related software is used to determine trends and predict the likelihood of an event occurring in a given amount of time.

IIoT is also commonly referred to as M2M (machine-to-machine), although in many cases unfairly.

What is an example of Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT)?

Consider an industrial environment (a manufacturing plant or a mine) having heavy equipment run by engines. In order to keep operations running smoothly, management typically has teams of maintenance professionals on site to ensure high levels of equipment or asset reliability. Maintenance workers may take meter readings daily and report on the number of operational hours each engine has run. With this data, they can plan for scheduled downtime to perform routine maintenance and prevent unexpected equipment breakdowns.

While this is all helpful, the gathering of the data is inefficient. IIoT can automate the process of collecting basic data and expand the number of variables collected including things like fuel consumption, load, exhaust temperatures, external temperature and air quality. This data is then passed to software to quickly analyze and visualize asset performance in real time.

The result is that you now have access to the mechanisms and tools required to consume and visualize vast amounts data in a way that allows you to materially impact the performance of your organization by predicting failures before they happen.