IoT for Manufacturing

IoT for Manufacturing

Industrial IoT (IIoT) exists today and is used by manufacturing companies like General Electric (GE). Mostly consisting of network-connected sensors, IIoT is used for quality assurance (QA) of manufactured parts and monitoring the health of the machines making the parts. Though it is still in its early stages, there is great potential to reduce human error in the QA process. By monitoring machine health, repairs and replacement can be done at times more specific to the machine’s needs. 

Monitoring especially produces an amount of data that requires advanced analytics software and professional data scientists to make it actionable. Another challenge around IIoT is the lack of an industry-wide standard for communication protocols between machines and between machines and sensors. Read more on IIoT in this SDxCentral definitional article.

The internet of things (IoT) is a computing concept that describes the idea of everyday physical objects being connected to the internet and being able to identify themselves to other devices. The term is closely identified with RFID as the method of communication, although it also may include other sensor technologies, wireless technologies or QR codes.

The IoT is significant because an object that can represent itself digitally becomes something greater than the object by itself. No longer does the object relate just to its user, but it is now connected to surrounding objects and database data.

Read More: what is the thing