siliconindia | | May 20178EXTENDING THE INTERNET OF THINGS TO BROWNFIELD DEVICESBy Suhas D. Joshi, Director, Enterprise Architecture Honeywell InternationalThe Internet of Things (IoT) is all about unlocking business value that is locked up in data generated by `things'. Consider a smart industrial pump that is used in an oil refinery. The pump gener-ates useful data regarding speed, volume of fluid passing through as well as vibration and noise level of the pump itself. If this data is collected from the pump and sent to an applica-tion for analysis, it will be possible to gain insight into data patterns that show the behavior of the pump. Certain anomalies, e.g. a high degree of vibration and noise with normal fluid speed and volume, may suggest that the pump needs to be serviced. If not serviced quickly, it will lead to a disruptive failure. A single averted disruption can save millions of dollars. Because of IoT related technologies such as networking, cloud technol-ogy, data storage and analytics, it is now possible to collect and analyze device data at a large scale and generate significant business value.IoT is a relatively recent development. But there are millions of devices, sensors and control-lers that were developed long before IoT came along. These devices generate data for `things' such as pumps, rooms or air handlers. Such de-vices have been already deployed in the field and use proprietary or standard protocols to communicate with other local devices or local applications. The local application resides in physical proximity of the devices, receives data generated by the devices and performs command and control. Refer to image 1 as an illustration of how legacy devices are connected. The automation and control protocols implemented in leg-acy (or brownfield) devices are designed for a local `site' lev-el communications and control, as opposed to communicating with a remote application that is accessed through Internet. For example, a water leak detector may communicate through a ModBus protocol, a temperature sensor communicates through BACnet protocol and an air handler unit may use LonWorks. Operations, Administration and Maintenance (OA&M) is per-formed locally and not remotely through the public Internet. IN MY OPINIONExtending the IoT to legacy devices may appear as a daunting task but the right architectural choices will definitely pave the way for successSuhas D. Joshi
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