Say, you want a revolution?

InTech, Nov 2006 by Conant, Rob, Pister, Kris

The same pressures that led to 18th century developments are reasserting themselves in the collision of the two worlds of industrial and information technology

Globalization, rising energy prices, and a strict regulatory environment are driving companies in a wide variety of industries to cut costs while increasing efficiency and productivity.

Changes in organizational infrastructure and processes in their facilities are transpiring in order to stay competitive.

Meanwhile, trying to meet production and profitability goals remains a significant organizational hurdle. Given these market dynamics, industry leaders are feeling pressure to adopt new technologies that will help them gain competitive advantages wherever they can find them.

These forces are contributing to a wave of innovation in how things take place in the industrial sectors we have not seen for many years. The same pressures that led to 18th century developments by inventors such as Eli Whitney, James Watt, and Charles Babbage are reasserting themselves in the collision of the two worlds of industrial and information technology (IT).

Just as the seed press and the steam engine catalyzed industries, so too, are today's manufacturing innovations-particularly those that can provide more access to more knowledge to plant managers and process engineers. This convergence of industry and information is leading to the "New Industrial Revolution."

Imagine, for example, if we could measure, manage, and refine environmental information and other data from the physical world with the same reliability as wired networks but at a lower cost. Data from the physical world, including temperature, lighting, humidity, energy consumption, and movement, could then be married to the world of industrial systems and IT.

Wireless sensor networks and industrial systems are now converging and giving rise to greater efficiencies not experienced since the first Industrial Revolution. As industrial plant managers discover they can do more with less, they are turning to wireless sensor networks that seamlessly integrate with legacy plant systems to develop comprehensive monitoring and control strategies.

Wireless sensor networks allow industry to collect information with more monitoring points, providing awareness into the environmental conditions that affect overall uptime, safety, or compliance in industrial environments and enabling agile and flexible monitoring and control systems. Wireless sensor networks connect critical processes or assets with the systems or experts that can interpret the data or take immediate action. At the end of the day, operational teams with more visibility into their processes can prevent shutdowns and increase efficiencies while reducing the total cost of data acquisition. All of this can add up to a distinct competitive advantage and a head start in the New Industrial Revolution.

Why wireless, why now

The New Industrial Revolution is possible because of recent advances in wireless networking technologies that leverage the capabilities of the existing monitoring and control infrastructure in areas not possible before, more than doubling the available monitoring points at a lower cost per point than current wired solutions.

Wireless sensor networks are comprised of battery-operated motes that have the ability to quickly form a network and communicate with each other. They deploy in a full mesh networking topology where each mote is a router, ensuring extremely low power and achieving greater 99.9% reliability.

Through techniques such as time-synchronized communication and frequency hopping, wireless sensor networks approach the reliability of wired networks, significantly knocking down the barriers to collecting information from the physical world by field intelligent devices.

While the potential to marry physical monitoring with wireless has always existed, the adoption of wireless technology, in particular, has been slow in making its way into industrial-grade monitoring and control systems. Many organizations have discovered traditional point-to-point wireless networks are prone to failure when faced with the challenging and dynamic radio frequency (RF) landscape presented by commercial and industrial environments. Likewise, wireless sensor networks designed for consumer-grade applications such as home automation, PC peripherals, and remote controls are simply inadequate for industrial applications.

However, with the recent technological advances in wireless networks, a whole host of monitoring and control applicationssuch as oil and gas, cold chain, and machine health monitoring-can now be enabled by seamlessly integrating wireless sensor networks into existing plant infrastructures. The flexibility and adaptability of wireless lowers the physical and cost limitations posed by wired systems, thereby lowering the total cost of ownership of an adaptive control strategy.

Reliability for harsh environments

The measure of success for an industrial-grade wireless sensor network is not how any individual network device performs, but how the system as a whole ensures a reliable flow of critical data. Reliability is an absolute requirement for any monitoring technology because if the data is not reliable then the economic benefits of its low installation costs are irrelevant.