The Internet of Things and its effect on engineering and design

Today, billions of devices, sensors and chips — many of them simple, everyday objects — can communicate with us and with each other using standard internet protocols. Data from these ‘things’ can be subjected to advanced analytics, producing real-time predictive insights and allowing automated decision-making. The combination of a physical thing and the analytical and decision models that describe it is often known as a ‘cyber-physical system’ — and when these cyber-physical systems start to communicate and collaborate with each other autonomously, the Internet of Things (IoT) comes to life.

As the number of devices connected to the internet continues to grow, so does an organisation’s need to collect, analyse and utilise the data produced by those devices. Indeed, many companies will define their early experiences with the Internet of Things by the value they create through new data-driven insights. To achieve success, they will need to look to cloud services to compose these new capabilities in an agile manner and pay for them as they are consumed. They will deploy applications that engage with the IoT to an increasingly mobile workforce and they will need to underpin their new IoT-ready enterprise with robust security capabilities.

Optimising the performance, maintenance and life of each thing is the first, and most obvious application for the IoT. Much of this can be achieved today, and indeed many companies have been successful in this area for some time. Car manufacturers, for example, have used onboard diagnostics and telemetry to optimise maintenance schedules and create fixed-price maintenance offerings. They’ve used predictive analytics in their factories to predict and reduce failures and to minimise the number of warranty recalls. But to achieve the real promise of IoT, things need to be connected, communicate with each other and make decisions for themselves in a decentralised fashion. Enter the ‘connected car’.

As an example of the IoT at work, the concept of the connected car is an easy one to grasp. Imagine the car you’re driving can sense that it is stuck in traffic. Without bothering you, the driver, it communicates with other cars in the area and discovers that a parallel route is less congested. It reworks its current GPS route settings and you manoeuvre the vehicle to take advantage of the new insight. Here the ‘things’ are communicating with each other, collaborating and enabling decentralised decisions to be made by each other, not by some central controller (in this case, you — the driver).

In this example, we have created a process of ‘congestion-aware routing’, and it is this pattern of new process capabilities, where one entity can be aware of others, that is the true power of the IoT. If we instrument a miner’s safety vest with sensors and allow it to communicate with our mining equipment, we can easily create safety-aware equipment operations, just as we can create more complex capabilities such as maintenance schedule-aware production or environment (weather)-aware production planning. When we create these new process capabilities across an entire organisation’s supply chain, we are building the IoT-enabled enterprise of the future.

Today, IoT systems are being extended to incorporate asset management systems and use predictive analytics to optimise maintenance. Other applications are focused on predicting and optimising production, productivity, energy utilisation, planning and scheduling. Indeed, we are seeing myriad potential applications for the IoT from waste management to urban planning, environmental sensing, sustainable urban environments, continuous care, emergency response, social interaction gadgets, intelligent shopping, event management, predictive maintenance — and many others we have not yet imagined.

Intelligent IoT systems will also help speed the development of new products, support dynamic response to product demands, and provide real-time optimisation of manufacturing production and supply chain networks through interconnectivity of machinery, sensors and control systems.

And as the line between smartphones and mobile devices blurs, and the linkage to IoT systems continues to expand, products and services which once might have been labelled science fiction are fast becoming a reality.

Ross Collins is a subject matter expert in IBM’s Predictive and Optimization Solutions Center of Excellence. He has a global role, focused on bringing the best of IBM’s analytical solutions to clients in the natural resources industries. He has over 30 years of IT experience and in previous roles has been IBM’s Chief Technical Officer for Chemicals & Petroleum and a Partner in IBM’s Global Business Services. He has worked with IBM’s clients in mining, oil and gas, energy distribution and telecommunications, developing a practical knowledge of predictive asset optimisation and the Internet of Things. He will be presenting on Smarter analytics — predictive asset optimisation and your industry on Day 1 of the ACI Connect Conference and Exhibition, 12 August, Sydney Olympic Park.