The industrial IoT has already proven its versatility with deployments going live in a number of enterprises, showing off dozens of different use cases. But a few key uses consistently present themselves within the same trade, and even throughout different industries.

Top 5 industrial IoT use cases

It’s important to note that IoT use cases will likely expand in the next few years. That being said, we have compiled the top five industrial IoT use cases of today:

Predictive maintenance

Keeping assets up and running has the potential to significantly decreasing operational expenditures (opex), and save companies millions of dollars. With the use of sensors, cameras and data analytics, managers in a range of industries are able to determine when a piece of equipment will fail before it ever does. These IoT-enabled systems can sense signs of warning, use data to create a maintenance timeline and preemptively service equipment before problems occur.

By leveraging streaming data from sensors and devices to quickly assess current conditions, recognize warning signs, deliver alerts and automatically trigger appropriate maintenance processes, IoT turns maintenance into a dynamic, rapid and automated task.

This approach promises cost savings over routine or time-based preventive maintenance, because tasks are performed only when they are needed. The key is to get the right information in the right time. This will allow managers to know which equipment needs maintenance, maintenance work can be better planned and systems remain online while workers stay on task. Other potential advantages include increased equipment lifetime, increased plant safety and fewer accidents with negative impact on environment.

Smart metering

A smart meter is an internet-capable device that measures energy, water or natural gas consumption of a building or home, according to Silicon Labs.

Traditional meters only measure total consumption, whereas smart meters record when and how much of a resource is consumed. Power companies are deploying smart meters to monitor consumer usage and adjust prices according to the time of day and season.

Smart metering benefits utilities by improving customer satisfaction with faster interaction, giving consumers more control of their energy usage to save money and reduce carbon emissions. Smart meters also give visibility of power consumption all the way to the meter so utilities can optimize energy distribution and take action to shift demand loads.

According to Sierra Wireless, smart metering helps utilities to:

• Reduce operating expenses by managing manual operations remotely
• Improve forecasting and streamline power-consumption
• Improve customer service through profiling and segmentation
• Reduce energy theft
• Simplify micro-generation monitoring and track renewable power

Asset tracking

A study on the maturity of asset efficiency practices from Infosys and the Institute for Industrial Management (FIR) at Aachen University revealed that 85% of manufacturing companies globally are aware of asset efficiency, but only 15% of the surveyed firms have implemented it at a systematic level.

Infosys and other supporting companies including Bosch, GE, IBM, Intel, National Instruments and PTC have launched a testbed with the main goal of collecting asset information efficiently and accurately in real-time and running analytics to allow the firms to make the best decisions.

The goal of asset tracking is to allow an enterprise to easily locate and monitor key assets (e.g. raw materials, final products, and containers) and to optimize logistics, maintain inventory levels, prevent quality issues and detect theft.

One industry that heavily relies on asset tracking is maritime shipping. On a large scale, sensors help track the location of a ship at sea, and on a smaller scale they are able to provide the status and temperature of individual cargo containers. One benefit is real-time metrics on refrigerated containers. These containers must be stored at constant temperatures so that perishable goods remain fresh.

Each refrigerated container needs to be equipped with temperature sensors, a processing unit and a mobile transmitter.

To continue reading, please visit the full article on Industrial IoT & 5G. 

The greatest advantage we have today is our ability to communicate with one another.

• Smart Cars will communicate with traffic lights to improve traffic, find a parking spot, lower insurance rates based on telematics data
• Smart Homes will have connected controls like temperature, electricity, cameras for safety and watch over your kids
• Smart healthcare devices will remind patients to take their medication, tell doctors when a refill is needed & help curb diabetic attacks, monitor symptoms and help disease prevention in real time, including in remote areas
• Smart Cities & Smart Industries are the buzz-words in IT policies of many governments
• With sensors and IoT enabled Robots used in Manufacturing - new products could potentially cost less in the future, which promotes better standards of living up and down all household income levels
• Hyper-Personalization – with Bluetooth, NFC, and Wi-Fi all the connected devices can be used for specifically tailored advertising based on the preferences of the individual
• Real time alerts in daily life - The Egg Minder tray holds 14 eggs in your refrigerator. It also sends a wireless signal to your phone to let you know how many eggs are in it and which ones are going bad.

Now here are the Bad things:

• There are no international standards of compatibility that current exist at the macro level for the Internet of Things
• No cross-industry technology reference architecture that will allow for true interoperability and ease of deployment
• All the mundane work can be transferred to Robots and there is potential to loss of jobs
•  All smart connected devices are expensive – Nest the learning thermostat cost about $250 as against $25 for a standard which gets a job done. Philips wireless controlled light cost $60 so your household will be huge expense to be remotely controlled

And the Ugly part:

• Remember the Fire Sale of Die Hard movie, a Cyber-attack on nation’s computer infrastructure - shutting down transportation systems, disabling financial systems and turning off public utility systems. Cyber-attacks can become common when devices are sold without proper updated software for connectivity
• Your life is open to hackers who can intercept your communications with individual devices and encroach your privacy. Imagine a criminal who can hack your smart metering utility system & identify when usage drops and assume that means nobody is home
• Imagine when you get into your fully connected self-driving car, and with some hacking a stalker’s voice come up from speaker “your have been taken” and you may not find Liam Neeson anywhere nearby, to rescue you.