FEBRUARY 2019

AI & IOT:
AT THE when to bring
CUTTING intelligence
industrial

EDGE closer to the action

by James Blackman
REPORT SPONSOR

Editor, Enterprise IoT Insights

 F E AT U R E R E P O R T
“There’s loads of compute and
storage in those things. There
always has been; it’s just you can
now connect them as part of a
bigger IoT deployment, and do more
than just pump data into the cloud.
It’s not about a machine doing
some local processing; it is about
connecting those devices together,
so the whole system does
awesome stuff”
Dirk Didascalou, vice president of
IoT, AWS
I
n the internet-of-things (IoT) market,
the volume of connected end-points
is head-spinning, already: 14.2 billion
in 2019, reckons Gartner, rising to 25
billion by 2021. In practical terms, the real
kicker is what to do with all the data from
these ‘things’.
That is the question that will determine
whether the potential value of the broad
IoT market – $1.2 trillion will be spent on
IoT technology in 2022, according to IDC –
is in digital transformation, or just in selling
the idea of it.
It is the difference between ‘sensing’ and
‘sense-making’, as it were – between the
connectivity and intelligence in IoT sys-
tems. A lucrative market has already grown
up for technology vendors connecting
‘things’, but digital change requires them
to work together to spark new business
insight – which only comes with artificial
intelligence (AI) at the edge.
“If you knew the state of everything and
could reason on top of that data, what
problems would you solve?” This is the
question AWS asks its interlocutors when
discussing the combination of sensors,
distributed compute power, and machine
2
learning in the industrial space. president of IoT at the Amazon subsidiary.
It is only by combining these elements “But there’s loads of compute and stor-
that we can take that question age in those things. There always
25bn
entirely seriously. Data science has been; it’s just you can now
is a hard road for humans. In connect them as part of a big-
conversation, AWS quotes a ger IoT deployment, and they
study about the hard graft of connected do more than just pump data.
data science: analysts spend ‘things’ It’s not about a machine do-
80 per cent of their time pre- by 2021 ing some local processing; it is
paring data; just 16 per cent - GARTNER about connecting those devic-
goes on training and refining it es together, and to the cloud,
$1.2tn
to eke out insights. so the whole system does
Humans have never been awesome stuff.”
much good at donkey work, The difference is the
and AI makes lighter works of it. – annual IoT clank and boom of in-
Computers, beasts of the infor- spending dustrial IoT is opening up
mation age, are being burdened by 2022 the closed world of oper-
with increasing volumes of data - IDC ational technology (OT) at
and equipped with advancing ma- last. Industrial machines are
chine-learning algorithms as ever-more not alone anymore. They are be-
‘things’ are connected. ing joined into a bigger system; their data
This is not new; the ‘edge’ – “the things- is being mixed up in the cloud and con-
space, the T-space in IoT,” says AWS – has sumed in flight, with each machine able to
always existed as a venue for industrial execute custom commands.
computing. “Maybe in the beginning, Increasingly, the processing is happen-
software people thought that just meant ing at the outer edge, close to the live ac-
silly sensors, pumping data into the big I – tion in factories and industrial plants. This is
into the cloud,” says Dirk Didascalou, vice the case for time-critical, business-critical,
 F E AT U R E R E P O R T

bandwidth-intensive, and bandwidth-void manager for autonomous machines at

applications. We will consider each of
these, momentarily. “That is the difference,”
comments Didascalou. “That is what’s
really happening at the edge.”
OFF-BROADWAY AI
The ‘edge’, then, is just an off-Broadway
venue for live-action AI, which comple-
ments the on-Broadway drama in the
cloud. The ‘intelligent edge’, a term coined
by the industry to describe the whole
scene, is already lowering the bottom line
for enterprises in any number of sectors.
Growth looks to be sudden, and massive.
Eighteen months ago, Gartner estimated
10 per cent of enterprise-generated data more; it is almost rudimentary to say so.”
was created and processed outside of
centralised data centres; its forecast, still able connected devices and connected
widely quoted, is the figure will reach 75
per cent by 2025.
Global data and analytics Nvidia.
revenues in smart Global data and analytics service rev-
manufacturing $26bn enues in smart manufacturing will reach
$7.5 billion by the end of 2022 and $25.6
billion in 2026, from a standing start of
around $2 billion today, says ABI Research.
“Edge computing is going to drive that,”
$7.5bn comments Pierce Owen, principal analyst
$2bn at ABI Research.
Many industrial functions cannot wait or
2018 2222 2226 rely on far-off algorithms to crunch and re-
Source: ABI Research, ‘ Balancing Edge and Cloud in the turn data for embedded systems to spark
Digital Factory’ (2018) into action. They need it in ’real-time’, and
the cloud won’t cut it. “The cloud is a tool,
and tools have specific purposes, but they
can’t do everything,” says Joe Speed, field
The magic of data centres was to en- chief technology officer for IoT solutions
at ADLINK.
enterprises to offload data into neb- Edge computing, bringing the heavy
ulous repositories for remote grunt of data analytics in-house, is the only

75%
But is this conservative, even? handling. Computing power promise that these IDC-sized enterprise in-
People are compelled to know was outsourced and made vestments will ever deliver a return – and,
the future, observes Tom invisible. But the dream of beyond, that AI will ever beget industrial
Bradicich, vice president for enterprise data IoT is to take constant and rebirth. These are the key elements: the
edge and IoT systems at HPE. processed at rapid illumination from motivation to change, and the means to
The laws of statistics and prob- edge by 2025 data – harvested massively, achieve it.
ability say the wider the sample, - GARTNER translated instantly. “For many of the most interesting and
the greater the insight; the IoT sec- Today, the promise of digital valuable problems, the intelligence has
tor is driven to deploy more devices to transformation is nothing short of to be closer to the action,” says Speed. But
gather more data. industrial revolution. “We are in the middle what are these use cases? What are their
“We’re connecting washing machines of one of one of the most significant tech- technical constraints, and how do enterpris-
and dog food bowls,” says Bradicich. “The nology transitions in the last 100 years,” es go about designing an edge architecture
Gartner stat’ is going to be 80 per cent, or comments Jesse Clayton, senior product to support them?

CASE STUDY
WATER FILTRATION UNITS (PENTAIR)
Pentair provides water filtration systems
equipped with sensors to fish farms and
large industrial brewing customers. Most
of its industrial customers are located
in geographies with unreliable internet
connectivity. They need to send data from
sensors and devices to the cloud while
continuously maintaining connection,
which is challenging in remote areas.
From Pentair’s water filtration systems,
data is sent to AWS IoT Core. When con-
nectivity is limited, AWS IoT Greengrass
provides Pentair with a local connection
so data is never lost.
Pentair can make decisions in near
real-time that impact the health of its
devices but also the health of the fish
– which in turn, results in better yields,
prevents the spread of disease, and lowers
the cost of operations.

3
 F E AT U R E R E P O R T

“The mass of data from industrial IoT

applications poses an enormous challenge.
Risks arise when the flood of data can no
longer be processed with the necessary low
latency. This happens when the physical path
from the sensor to the cloud is ‘too long’. ”
Bernd Gross, chief technology officer,
Software AG

REAL TIME OPERATIONS
Modern AI is having such an impact because
“it performs better than previous approach-
es and, in some cases, better than humans,”
explains Clayton at Nvidia. The problem is,
in many cases, it will not perform at all, or at
least not quickly enough to be valuable, if it
is locked away in data centres.
“Anything that needs to operate in real
time has to be done at the edge,” says Owen
at ABI Research. Running intelligence in
edge-based infrastructure means applica-
tions are less constrained by network la-
Andreas Vogel, vice president at SAP Labs, making the case for private LTE as an indus-
comments: “A round-trip to the cloud which trial transport technology, presents a graph-
can be hundreds of milliseconds and more ic with an axis for latency and an axis for
might be too slow for certain operations. bandwidth, and AI applications mapped be-
Edge computing can deliver responses in tween (see below). LTE, privately managed,
tens of milliseconds.” gets you to latency of 40-50ms, it reckons;
Bradicich at HPE raises the classic chal- 5G, with tuning, will go further, >> page 6
lenge of response times
in autonomous vehicles.
“How soon do you want to Mapping latency and bandwidth
know the object in front of
you is a garbage can ver-
against IoT applications
sus a girl? You really want
10Gbps

tency and bandwidth, the twin gods in any to send that data to the 360 VIDEO VR + VEHICLES
real-time comms architecture. cloud – and then wait?”
“The sheer mass of data from industrial He also introduces ideas
IoT applications poses an enormous chal- about compliance and
100Mbps

lenge,” says Bernd Gross, chief technology corruption into the mix –
Bandwidth

officer at Software AG and chief executive benefits that are less about
at Cumulocity. Risks arise when the system making the industrial en-
gets flooded and the pipes get blocked. gine hum, and more about
1Mbps

“This happens when the physical path
from the sensor to the cloud is ‘too long’,”
he explains.
The concept of ‘real time’ is relative; frac-
clearing the road so the
wheels can roll. But latency
and bandwidth are the real
showstoppers so far as in-
10kbps

tions matter, as the difference between dustrial performance goes. PEOPLE + THINGS SYSTEM CONTROL
success and failure in the industrial world. They demarcate the
10s 1s 100ms 10ms 1ms 100us
“Seconds of excessive heat stress are suf- edge – how far compute
ficient to cause cost-intensive damage on and inference goes from Latency Source: Nokia
sensitive machines,” says Gross. the factory floor. Nokia,

4
 F E AT U R E R E P O R T

Where is the IIoT edge? Four points

on the edge-cloud continuum
T
he Industrial Internet Consortium

SCALE
(IIC) has mapped out a “continuum” DEVICE / EQUIPMENT PLANT FACTORY / RIG / MINE ENTERPRISE
of edge computing in industrial set-
tings, with the ‘edge’ variously locat-
DRIVERS

ed at certain points of remove from the data

source depending on the technical require-
ments of the use case.
Todd Edmunds, senior solution architect
at Cisco, and author of an IIC white paper
on the subject, defines the ‘edge’ as a logical
layer, rather than a specific physical divide,
describing a “continuum of fundamental ca-
pabilities” for industrial IIoT solutions. “The
definition of edge moves depending on your
problem,” says Edmunds. ”You might be con-
trolling data with an edge temperature con-
troller, and you might be aggregating data in
a single cloud instance from 35 factories.”
The IIC’s four industrial IoT edge scenar-
ios – at device level to measure pump tem-
peratures, at plant level to monitor machine
performance, at the factory perimeter to
optimise supply chain processes, and at en-
terprise level to predict equipment failure
(see graphic above; described by the IIC in
situ, below) – are only a snapshot of a layered
decentralised compute architecture.
Decision latency, connectivity, control requirements, information decay, analytical complexity
1 IOT EQUIPMENT
2 IOT GATEWAYS / INDUSTRIAL PCS
3 IOT MICRO DATA CENTRE
4 IOT CLOUD
Edge computing - manufacturers have four options for placement of compute power, from the device to the cloud
“The definition of edge moves facility, factory or an oil field requires data
from multiple sources at short intervals to
depending on your business apply optimisation algorithms that will adapt
problem. You might be supply-chain plans in systems like SCM or ERP.
The fundamental capability requires local or
controlling data with an edge factory-level connectivity with decisions made
temperature controller, and in hours. Additional information outside the
you might be aggregating perimeter of the factory may be useful, but not
mandatory for effective optimisation. In this
data in a single cloud instance instance, the edge is at the perimeter of the
from 35 factories“ factory, plant or local facility.”

1 | EQUIPMENT PROTECTION Todd Edmunds, senior solution 4 | PREDICTIVE MAINTENANCE

“In this scenario, a ‘dumb’ thermocouple
measures temperature on a pump. A pump
with edge computing capability can perform
basic analytics to determine if a threshold
is exceeded, and shut the pump down in
milliseconds. There is no decision latency
and no need for connectivity to perform this
function. Connectivity is not necessary, but it
may be used for notification. The time value of
the temperature information decays rapidly
as delayed response can result in equipment
damage. In this case the edge is at the device
level as it can achieve the key objective.”
2 | PERFORMANCE MONITORING
“The performance of production equipment
architect, Cisco
is often expressed through performance
indicators like ‘overall equipment effectiveness’
(OEE). Near real-time analytics on multiple
data points from sensors in the plant area can
be processed on a local gateway and provide
OEE trends and alerts to operational systems.
This case requires data from multiple sources
to perform simple analytics. The time value of
information is high as response delays waiting
for decisions from the cloud can cause signifi-
cant losses. Here, the edge is at the plant level.”
3 | SUPPLY-CHAIN OPTIMISATION
“Optimising supply chain processes for a local
“Machine learning models to predict Electric
Submersible Pump (ESP) failures require data
from many offshore platforms. The analytics
are complex and require large amounts of
data to train models. It also requires regular
data feeds from ESPs to determine each unit’s
remaining life. The data from individual ESPs
needs to be analysed regularly but informa-
tion decay is much slower than in the other
scenarios and decisions can be taken daily or
weekly. Computation is typically performed at
the enterprise level using a public or private
cloud. The edge can be anywhere along the
time-value graph. It is ‘where’ data for sensors
is used to achieve a specific key objective or
address a specific business problem.”

5
 F E AT U R E R E P O R T
eventually, to closer 1ms.
There is a chicken-and-egg question
about the architecture and the applica-
tions, with edge use cases emerging all the
time. But the applications that have led the
charge to the outer rim, for the industrial set
at least, are clear in the Nokia graphic: vid-
eo canes bandwidth, and demands closer
compute functions; mixed reality applica-
tions hinge on lightning data handoffs.
Combine these elements of speed and
throughput, and nothing but the edge
will do. “It’s impossible to make AR hap-
pen with regional data centres,” remarks
Stephan Litjens, general manager of dig-
ital automation at Nokia. He suggests an
experiment to put traditional data-centre
latencies into perspective.
“Look at me,” he says, “your eyes will fol-
low, automatically, as I move – that reflex in
your eyes is 7ms. Now think of a data cen-
tre in the next city, over the horizon. Just
for the light to go back and forth is 10ms.
So it’s game over. You must have the edge
cloud on site – and that’s not just for AR,
but all kinds of industrial processes.”
THE ‘SWEET SPOT’
These are the use cases that have tipped the
balance, for suppliers and customers. “At
some point, over a period of time, the big
cloud guys had an epiphany, and realised,
‘oh crap, we can’t do what we want unless
we move to the edge’,” explains Speed, in
reference to moves by AWS, Google, IBM,
and Microsoft to join the action at various
points during the past three years.
“The thing that made them realise was
[machine] vision. They were tackling it by
taking the data to the cloud, and analysing
it there. That’s okay for a lot of use cases,
but not for all – and vision was the one that
broke the camel’s back.”
Farshid Sabet, managing director of In-
tel’s vision processor business unit, agrees.
“Right now, we see a confluence of machine
vision and machine learning,” he comments.
This confluence is at the edge. The
volumes of data generated by imaging
sensors in critical industrial applications
cannot be reasonably processed anywhere
6
else. Bandwidth costs money, and is liable
to fail. “If you take it to the cloud, you’re too
late – the part has been damaged, the box
has been misplaced, the worker has been
injured,” says Speed.
The “sweet spot” for edge computing
is when both latency and bandwidth de-
mands combine at once, says Diego Tam-
burini, principal industry lead for man-
ufacturing in Microsoft’s Azure division
– “when a huge amount of processing has
to happen fast”.
One innovative example of this – which
seems to capture the mad reach of both hu-
man imagination and machine intelligence
– is from Swiss technology firm Bühler. It
has developed an optical sorter to punch-
out carcinogenic corn kernels, infected by a
mould called aflatoxin, from a waterfall-like
corn-feed in food processing plants.
3.5m
In the Bühler solution, corn gets
per sec
fed from a truck to a hopper, and
into a chute, and falls at 3.5
– rate at which mai ze metres per second as a single
passes in front of “yellow sheet of corn”. Cameras
LumoVision camera; project UV light to illuminate
time enough to the grains; a telltale fluores-
id and eliminate
bad kernels cence shows up the aflatoxin,
and high-speed air jets shoot con-
taminated kernels into a rejects bin.
The rest passes into shipping containers.
Microsoft is providing the edge and ana-
lytics tools. Tamburini comments: “We’re
talking milliseconds; just imagine: the corn
kernel is falling at speed, and the machine
finds time to take a picture, process it, make
a decision, and take an action.”
The Bühler solution, called LumoVision,
processes 10 to 15 tonnes of maize – or an
entire truckload – in an hour. It was tested
with Italian agricultural cooperative Capa
Cologna, and shown at Hannover Messe in
2018. The phone has been ringing off the
hook ever since.
But latency and bandwidth constraints
do not even have to be combined; stretch-
ing demand in either direction makes
edge computing compulsory. “If you need
to shut down a nuclear plant because the
temperature goes 0.001 degrees above a
Vision – Bühler builds the LumoVision (top) certain level, then you probably want to
7
 F E AT U R E R E P O R T

% oil
>1fro
of data m
Offshore – an oil rig in the North Sea; analytics must run locally as there is little or no connectivity, and operators are sensitive to breaches rigs is used for
decision
run that at the edge,” says Tamburini. “That’s why data and reliability, which making
Sometimes, the question is not whether plays on both - MCKINSEY
bandwidth is constrained, but whether it analytics revenues will of these, and data
is even available. In certain out-of-reach in- take off in the next few protection are also
dustrial locales – off-shore oil rigs, out-back driving this digital exodus.
mines, to give the most quoted examples
years – because edge These considerations have, until recent-
– the computing is forcibly confined just computing appeals to these ly, kept wireless networks out of industrial
because the edge is out of range. manufacturers that are plants, and OT separate from IT. Indeed,
At other times, it is imposed because the volume of processed data out of most
communications have been knocked out either very cautious about industrial setups has been flat for 30 years.
completely. ADLINK has good example of data privacy, or else can’t Most is never available for analysis; in-
this. It deployed sensors and sense-making stead, it is stored, and eventually trashed.
solutions on the ground in Puerto Rico after
ship much off premise for AWS quotes findings from McKinsey &
Hurricane Maria tore through in late 2017. regulatory reasons.” Company, which asked offshore oil rigs a
The US Federal Emergency Management few years back how much of their data is
Agency deployed “every emergency gen- Pierce Owen, principal analyst, made valuable. “Less than one per cent is
erator it could lay its hands on”, says Speed, ABI Research ever used for any decision making,” says
to re-establish power to hospitals, schools, Didascalou. “Data generation always hap-
and other services. “But none of them were rapid-paced technology “smash-up”, says pens at the edge; it’s just very little finds its
connected – none were instrumented or Speed, to enable local services to function way into a data centre for analytics.”
monitored,” says Speed. until full power returned. This is still the case, to a greater extent.
ADLINK put engineering boots on the But the combination with edge com-
ground in Puerto Rico to establish an emer- IT/OT CONVERGENCE puting, introducing new reliability to
gency IoT network to manage the power But, actually, bandwidth and latency con- critical IoT applications, means sensitive
reserves. Data from the generators was straints do not even have to be decisive to data can be retained in-house, managed
stored locally, and uploaded to the cloud dictate the migration of industrial intelli- between the shop-floor edge and the
as connectivity flashed in and out. It was a gence to the edge of the network. Network private-cloud edge.

8
 F E AT U R E R E P O R T

In the end, the only real security is in sol-

CASE STUDY itary confinement, at the edge, comments
Bradicich at HPE. He’s good with analogies,
SEMICONDUCTORS (INTEL) and mixes a couple for us: “If you never
leave your house, you’ll never get hit by a
Semiconductor maker Intel has applied It also needed to identify the be- car. Reagan left the White House, and he got
predictive maintenance to monitor haviour of each FFU through traditional shot – and he had the best security going.”
the health of its fan filter units (FFUs) reporting, including statistics, graphs, While isolationism is impractical in the
through deployment of sensors and and charts based on summary data. real world, it is preferred in the OT world,
edge computing. The idea Intel combined with GE Digital to and workable in the IoT world, with edge
was to alert technicians develop a solution based on Intel’s computing. “If data goes across the ocean,
to potential problems,
define a maintenance
schedule, and reduce
300% ‘Intel IoT’ gateways and GE’s Pre-
dix platform, enabling data pro-
cessing at the edge. Intel placed
across the campus, it’s more vulnerable to
attack,” says Owen at ABI.
“That’s why data and analytics revenues
reduction in
downtime. downtime on an accelerometer at the top of will take off in the next few years. Because
FFUs clean the air manua l each FFU to measure variations edge computing is much more appealing
inside industrial ma- inspections in the fan’s function, creating a to these manufacturers that are either very
chines. Detecting their baseline for comparing data across cautious about the privacy of their data, or
health is a manual process, both the tool and fleet. It also inte- else cannot ship very much off premise for
which makes predicting failures hard. grated accelerometers with gateways regulatory reasons.”
“FFUs represent a single process that and edge applications, and developed Contemporary edge systems provide mech-
is small enough in scope yet large machine learning algorithms to feed on anisms to deliver storage, processing, and
enough in impact to demonstrate a the data. inference at the ‘coal face’, and only release
return on investment in the factory,” Summary data was sent to the cloud summary data to the cloud. In the case of
says Intel. for a view into baselines and trends, and hyper-connected, hyper-animated industrial
They are “exceptional” for demonstrat- a chance to respond to alerts of anom- machines, it is often more practical to send
ing the ROI potential of an edge-com- alies. Intel has reduced downtime from interval-averages, than to send every reading.
puting and cloud-based industrial IoT FFU failures by 300 per cent over manu- Vogel at SAP cites the high sampling rates
solution, it reckons. The company want- al inspection. In parallel, it has increased of modern sensors – 1,000 data points per
ed to move the analytics to the edge FFU uptime by 97 per cent, by ordering second is typical, he says. “The solution is to
in order to reduce data across the net- replacement parts and scheduling pre-process or filter the data at the edge to
work, and manage security. maintenance ahead of time. reduce the data volume. Alternatively the
entire data processing could be done at the
edge. In this case, the edge becomes an on-
A
site micro data centre.”
EDGE ANALYTICS More than this, momentum is building
SENSOR SENSOR SENSOR
Intel IoT Gateway because the technology is improving, with
SENSOR SENSOR SENSOR more sophisticated encryption in the device
GE Predix platform hardware and the transport network. Indus-
trialists, conservative by nature, are more
SUMMARY familiar with it, too. Whisper it, it might even
REPORT
DATA be that they over-stated the security of their
B own OT and IT in the first place.
EDGE ANALYTICS “They realise, particularly small and me-
SENSOR SENSOR SENSOR
Edge – sensors dium OT environments, that they can get
Intel IoT Gateway on the FFUs better security if they trust someone like
SENSOR SENSOR SENSOR
measure vibration; Microsoft than with their own OT or IT re-
GE Predix platform
data is passed to an sources. They are coming to terms with the
AI-edge architecture fact they overestimated their IT resources,
to issue alerts and they are more secure if they go to the
commercial cloud.”

9
 F E AT U R E R E P O R T
HYBRID EDGE-CLOUD
Of course, edge computing does not elim-
inate the value of cloud-based analytical
functions in IoT setups. “The two technol-
ogies complement each other, to enable
end-to-end industrial IoT solutions,” says
Gross at Software AG. “The edge is where
time-critical data is processed; the cloud is
where data is retrieved, stored, analysed,
and sent back.”
Most industrial devices will continue to
rely on the cloud to store data. Edge com-
puting helps balance the workload, stops
IoT from overwhelming the system, and
brings faster inference. A standard model
for edge-cloud computing is well estab-
lished already.
Didascalou at AWS explains: “The pat-
tern is always the same: data is collected
at the edge, aggregated and analysed in
the cloud, and brought back to machines,
where smarter decisions are taken.” Training
machine learning algorithms is computa-
tionally expensive; running them is not.
Clayton comments: “Deep learning is
one of the most computationally challeng-
ing applications ever devised.”
Speed says: “It might take a week to train
on a piece of hardware at the edge, and
just an hour in the cloud.”
It is a case of muscle and flexibility. While
training is a fitful labour, carried out at a
distance; inference is a constant task, or-
ganised close at hand. “Training requires
a lot of compute, and frequency is limited;
you want to recognise and infer all the
time,” explains Sabet at Intel.
Beyond these disciplines, of heavy-duty
analytics and light-touch inference, data
collection should be maintained between
the edge and cloud on a cycle of continu-
ous improvement.
This hybrid architecture, making use of
public and private clouds, will be the de-
fault methodology within five years, reck-
ons ABI Research. As it stands, 54 per cent
of industrial cloud arrangements are with
public facilities, 31 per cent go private,
and 15 per cent leverage both in hybrid
setups that train in the cloud and deploy
at the edge.
10
CASE STUDY
STEAM
GENERATORS
(CERTUSS)
German company Certuss produces
low-noise steam generators for contin-
uous operation. The devices are used
in various fields of application, includ-
ing to sterilise surgical instruments.
As they are often involved in multi-
stage production, there is a potential
for errors that cannot be ignored –
even minor faults can have a negative
impact on the production result. To
counteract this, Certuss has set up
a real-time analytics and predictive
maintenance service using the Cumu-
locity IoT platform.
The solution makes it possible to
analyse about 60 parameters – pres-
sure, temperature, water level, for
example – for each steam generator
in real time. With the data obtained,
predictions can be made as to when
and at which point in the production
chain faults will occur. In addition,
the required amount of steam can be
determined via remote configuration,
which in turn can reduce energy costs.
Edge – manufacturing rapid steam generators
Jetson – the latest Xavier AI vision module from Nvidia
“Deep learning is one of
the most computationally
challenging applications
ever devised”
Jesse Clayton, senior product manager
for autonomous machines, Nvidia
But the balance is shifting fast. “In prac-
tice we see many organisations adopting
a hybrid approach, where some analytics is
run at the edge, and then metadata is sent
to the cloud for higher-level analysis,” com-
ments Clayton at Nvidia.
ABI Research predicts 52 per cent of in-
dustrial organisations engaging the cloud
will take a hybrid approach by 2023. “A hy-
brid approach is the best way to deal with
data in industrial environments,” says Owen
at ABI Research. “It’s an efficient way to
leverage compute power both at the edge
and the cloud without the costs of publish-
ing every reading to the cloud.”
But there are myriad variables within hy-
brid architectures, particularly at the edge-
end. “Different use cases require different
system topologies,” says Clayton.
Where, then, within the edge architecture
does the intelligence lie? An easy answer is
hard to find, but the principle is simple: the
edge closes around the ‘thing space’ as the
 F E AT U R E R E P O R T

operations become more critical and inten-

sive – or, indeed, more practically discerning.
“It might take a week to train
The hardware platform – typically, an on a piece of hardware at
Intel or Nvidia chipset, powering a Linux the edge, and just an hour in
or Windows operating system, running an
AWS or Azure IoT runtime, hosting an AI the cloud”
model as a container on top – is geed-up ”
and brought closer as these variables be-
come more extreme.
“It will be in the electronics in the ma-
chine, or in a gateway that connects sev-
eral machines; it depends on the scenario,”
says Tamburini. The question of wired /
wireless connectivity is a consideration,
too, he says, depending on the distance
between machine and processor; but the
biggest factor is the processing power em-
bedded into the machine itself. Power – embedded compute modules in industrial machines are bringing higher intelligence to the edge

“It might take a week to train

on a piece of hardware at Private vs public vs hybrid
the edge, and just an hour in
the cloud” cloud architecture
Joe Speed, field chief technology officer
for IoT solutions, ADLINK 52%
of industrialists
using the cloud
PRIVATE

EMBEDDED POWER
Let us consider, briefly, the position and will take a hybrid
portfolio of the two chief protagonists in sil- approach by
icon production for industrial edge devices. 2023 - ABI
Nvidia’s Tesla and DGX products are for
data-centre AI; its Jetson kit, including the
new AGX Xavier AI platform, is designed for
the edge. Its hardware-software combina-
tion makes it possible to deploy AI-powered
PUBLIC

robots, drones, intelligent video analytics

applications and other intelligent devices at
scale, says Clayton.
He gives customer references: factory
automation group FANUC has adopted its
GPUs for its ‘intelligent edge link and drive’
(FIELD) IoT platform; auto-parts maker Mu-
sashi is using Jetson for automated optical
HYBRID

inspection; internet retailer JDx has adopt-

ed the same for warehouse robots.
ADLINK is a champion, too; it integrates
Nvidia’s Jetson TX2 modules into its rugged
Neon-J smart camera – the latest in a line of
AI-enabled IoT devices that “collapses the

11
 F E AT U R E R E P O R T
image sensor, camera
module, and compute
[function] into a single
piece of kit that fits in your
hand,” says Speed.
Meanwhile, in the blue corner, In-
tel’s Xeon-branded processing units
for servers opetrate at either extreme,
and its Myriad X processing unit features
a dedicated neural compute engine for ma-
chine vision applications at the edge.
Myriad X, developed by Intel’s Movidius
division, is designed for low-power,
small-footprint IoT cameras, but can be
racked in twos, fours, and sixes in ‘vision ac-
celerator cards’ for beefier IoT applications.
The Myriad X is in the guts of a new an-
ti-poaching camera, TrailGuard AI, a minia-
ture “electronic eyeball”, shown at CES 2019
and deployed already on poaching trails in
Africa. The camera takes a picture when it
12
senses movement and heat,
runs image recognition algo-
rithms in response, and alerts
park keepers to intervene.
The whole process takes
minutes. The hardware is dis-
cerning and efficient. Only
positive identifications are raised
to the park control room; the rest of
the footage is trashed or stored for later.
ADLINK is using Intel processors in oth-
er members of its Neon family (see image,
above). “Instead of sending video to the
cloud, or to other workers, it discerns that
the door’s open, the door’s closed, that
it’s a good part; it’s analysing what it sees,”
explains Speed.
It shows the enhanced capacity and strat-
egy for intelligence at the furthest edge. In
hardware terms, the capability of machines
to ‘see’ and select relies on calculations
“Facial recognition is
becoming more mature –
computers can recognise
faces as well as humans.
But in audio, there remains
a deficiency – with accents
and noise.”
Farshid Sabet, managing director,
vision processor business, Intel
about image segmentation, depth, and
navigation. “Those are the classic challeng-
es with computer vision,” says Sabet. But the
technology is advancing, and the challeng-
es are changing. “Facial recognition is be-
coming more mature – computers can rec-
ognise faces as well as humans. >> page 14

Assurance – the HPE / Foxconn machine vision solution by Relimetrics (above) checks server assemblages for
anomalies, flagging them to factory workers in a dashboard (right)
CASE STUDY
ELECTRONICS (FOXCONN)
Q
uality assurance is a critical part of
manufacturing; it’s just humans
are not very good at it. Their fac-
ulties are not trained to pick out
anomalies in rapid carousels of industrial
assemblages. More than this, they just can’t
do it. Modern manufacturing, particularly
of discrete electronics, is too complex and
too various for human eyes. But machine
learning, at the edge, is turning fallible old
production checks into fail-safe new produc-
tivity gains.
Case in point: HPE and Foxconn have de-
veloped a machine version of Where’s Wally?
to discern the production-line equivalent
striped hats in grey boxes, and raise the
alarm. It is a symbiotic arrangement, using
HPE edge components to automate quali-
ty assurance on a Foxconn production line
carrying HPE servers. The new system, devel-
oped with video analytics firm Realmetrics,
is being positioned as a support line for the
standing workforce, to relieve it of duties it
was never qualified for in the first place. “It’s
always there, and it’s always checking,” says
Steve Fearn, global chief technologist at HPE.
Machines bring precision and control, and
they are eminently biddable – the Foxconn
system won’t rush the work to clock-off ear-
ly, “to get home to the family”. We encoun-
ter him at an HPE showcase in Geneva; he
shows a picture of a slide from a Space X
product. “It’s important that part is correct –
“It’s important that part is
correct – otherwise there’ll be
a big bang and a squeal from
someone inside the vehicle”
Steve Fearn, global chief technologist, HPE
otherwise there’ll be a big bang and a squeal
from someone inside the vehicle.”
He shows another image, this time of a
carbon sample from a Formula One car; it’s
somehow critical, but it could be anything.
The stakes are high, and humans are falli-
ble, he explains. “Things are getting smaller,
things are getting more varied, and yet we
need more precision.” The Foxconn cus-
tom-and-supply circle has been put to work
at Foxconn’s European manufacturing facili-
ty in Kutna Hora, in the Czech Republic. John
Gallagher, operations manager of Foxconn,
is in charge. “Quality underpins everything
that we do,” he says.
But, as with discrete manufacturing, its
products are complex, its batch sizes are
small, its production is swift, and its sched-
ule is packed. The Kutna Hora line for HPE
servers jumps to a new configuration every
three or four units; 50-60 per cent of its units
are shipped within 24 hours of joining the
assembly line. “We’ve got people inspecting,
and they miss a lot of things,” says Gallagh-
er. The new edge system catches the faults
F E AT U R E R E P O R T
before they cause delays, and makes good
on Foxconn’s quality promise. “If we say it
will get there on Tuesday, it will get there on
Tuesday.”
On the conveyor in Kutna Hora, every unit
enters a section for video review; mobile
cameras move into inspect every aspect of
the unit, from every angle. The cameras are
2D; Foxconn has no requirement for 3D ma-
chine vision at the site, as yet. Its machine
learning is trained in the cloud and executed
on site. Anything that does not pass muster
– “damaged components, missing compo-
nents, foreign objects, incorrect configura-
tions” – goes to a human referee. Any ques-
tion, and it is seized for a second opinion,
and either righted and re-entered, or else
held back; the production lines keeps chug-
ging along all the while.
Nothing goes to waste. The facility has
moved away from a “he-said, she-said” de-
velopment path, says Fearn, towards itera-
tive production based on hard data. “Varia-
tion is the killer; we can now capture every
configuration and every fault and improve
the manufacturing process.”
Foxconn is working to run the same vid-
eo checks on individual assembly stages, to
identify at an earlier stage in the production
process. “We would basically break down the
analytics one by one, and then eliminate the
need for a final inspection,” comments Gal-
lagher.
13
 F E AT U R E R E P O R T
But in audio, there remains a deficiency –
with accents and noise,” he says.
Sabet gives parallel examples of ‘live’
analysis of motion and mood: a securi-
ty camera that computes and connects
when a robber comes into view; a baby
monitor that records and uploads when
a newborn breaks into a smile; a vehicle
camera that sounds an alarm when the
driver’s eyes get heavy.
What about in the case of the corn-ker-
nel sorter, presented earlier, and other ex-
treme industrial IoT deployments: where is
the intelligence at? It is down to the ‘thing’
itself, explains Tamburini. “The fastest re-
sponse is close to the sensors and actua-
tors; with Bühler, it is on the device itself,
running a beefy chip with lots of memory
and processing power.”
REMAINING BARRIERS
It is worth noting, before we sign off, that
the work is far from done. The migration of
industrial intelligence to the edge is just be-
ginning, as the various forecasts quoted in
this article attest. The fragmentation of the
IoT market makes it hard to make money
from, for starters, putting a dampener on
progress. “If you want to be the next Mark
Zuckerberg or Elon Musk, don’t go in to
IoT,” Wienke Giezeman, chief executive and
co-founder of Amsterdam based LoRaWAN
collective The Things Network, told Enter-
prise IoT Insights recently.
Significantly, the lack of standards makes
it hard for startups to scale. That complex-
ity is compounded in the industrial space,
where a policy of isolationism,
already discussed, has
14
“The fastest response is
close to the sensors and
actuators – on the device
itself, running a beefy chip
with lots of memory and
processing power.”
Diego Tamburini, principal industry lead
for manufacturing, Microsoft Azure
seen multiple protocols take root; major
configuration is still required with most
industrial IoT deployments just to have
machines ‘talk’ the same language.
“We are a long way from the plug-
and-play scenario where you connect a
robot from one vendor and a lathe from
another, and they talk to each other
without any kind of translation,” says
Tamburini at Microsoft.
This is where ADLINK plays, as the oil in
the engine, to translate between different
communication and software protocols.
Interoperability remains a challenge for
the major cloud players, too, it notes – de-
spite their convergence around the same
edge IoT architecture and technology,
most notably with Google’s open-source
machine learning framework, TensorFlow.
Each has developed its own programming
interfaces (APIs); each is making “different
decisions” around security. “There’s some
nuance,” says Speed. “At a 10,000 foot lev-
el, it’s all the same, but it is quite different
when you get into the detail.”
But the cloud players have settled on
an edge IoT architecture, at least, and
momentum is building around OPC-UA
and MTConnect as complementary http
protocols, where the first defines the
communications pipeline and the second
defines the payload. MQTT, a lightweight
sensor protocol, is also commonly used
for ‘on-ramp’ to the cloud. “You may think
the standards are still fragmented. But it’s
complete progress compared to years ago,
when everyone had their own proprietary
protocols and technologies,” comments
Speed at ADLINK.
Tamburini at Microsoft is more cautious.
“There is some consolidation, but it is far
from ubiquitous,” he says. “Standards are
like toothbrushes – everybody needs one,
no one wants to share.” Even, so, he ob-
serves “a lot of momentum”, especially as
industrial machinery is upgraded and the
edge takes a more common form.
F E AT U R E D C O M PA N Y

ADLINK Technology is a global leader in Edge Computing, with solutions

that drive data-to-decision applications and support the transition to
connected IIoT systems across industries.

15
 U P CO M I N G 2 0 1 9 E D I TO R I A L
P R O G R A M S I N C LU D E :

MARCH 2019

Enterprise IoT Insights |

Making Industry Smarter #1:
Supply Chain & Logistics (report series)

Enterprise IoT Insights |

Need guaranteed leads? Digital Factory Solutions 1# :

Thought leadership?  5G Connectivity (report series)

Incremental content  APRIL 2019

marketing opportunities?
Enterprise IoT Insights |
Sponsor an RCR Wireless / Enterprise IoT Insights multi-platform, editorial Smart City Learnings #1:
program and receive the following benefits: City TBC (report series)

EDITORIAL WEBINAR – sponsorship includes 250 guaranteed leads, partic-

ipation as sponsored guest, and recognition as sponsor in all promotional M AY 2 0 1 9
materials. Sponsors will receive webinar registration and attendee list,
responses to pre / post surveys, responses to polls gathered during webinar. Enterprise IoT Insights |
Making Industry Smarter #2:
EDITORIAL REPORT – in addition to recognition as sponsor in program pro- Agriculture & Farming (report series)
motion, sponsorship includes 250 guaranteed leads, distinct from webinar
leads, one-page ad spread or advertorial in feature report, and responses to
lead capture survey questions. JUNE 2019

25% discount when you sponsor two or more programs. Enterprise IoT Insights |
For information contact: sales@rcrwireless.com Digital Factory Solutions 2# :
Virtual & Augmented Reality (report series)
Fast facts about RCR Wireless:
382,000 monthly page views J U LY 2 0 1 9
170,000 unique monthly visitors to websites
81,000+ opt in newsletter subscribers Enterprise IoT Insights |
Making Industry Smarter #3:
220,526 monthly video minutes
Ports & Shipping (report series)
45,000 leads generated annually
Industry leading demand generation programs and results
AU G U S T 2 0 1 9

Enterprise IoT Insights |

Smart City Learnings #2:
City TBC (report series)

Each program is limited to three (3) sponsors

www.rcrwireless.com/category/free-reports