In this chapter, we will learn about the basic technologies that are used to develop an I-IoT platform with the most common original equipment manufacturer (OEM) platforms. We will discover the Predix Platform through a small exercise.
In this chapter, we will cover:
The link to code files of this chapter can be found at https://github.com/PacktPublishing/Hands-On-Industrial-Internet-of-Things.
The word IoT was defined in 1999, but we expect there to be a big revolution in 2020. Much time has passed since the first definition of IoT, and it should come as no surprise that big OEMs have now developed their own platforms. I-IoT OEM platforms have the great advantage of being able to support on-premise legacy solutions and strongly-focused analytics.
There are more than 120 IoT platforms in existence, of which over 20 are I-IoT OEM platforms. These include GE Predix, Bosch IoT, Siemens MindSphere, Honeywell Sentience, Carriots, and Cisco Jasper.
The following chart shows a comparison of the Google trends (https://trends.google.it/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&q=%2Fg%2F11b7yq57zp,BOSCH%20IOT,Siemens%20Mindsphere,Intel%20IOT) for Predix, Bosch, Siemens MindSphere, Intel IoT, and Honeywell Sentience:
GE Predix is the most mature I-IoT OEM platform. In 2012, GE, one the biggest conglomerates in the world working in energy, aviation, healthcare, and transportation, decided to invest in digital transformation. In 2013, GE released the Predix Platform, a cloud-based platform based on microservices and Cloud Foundry (CF). With Predix, we can register for free and test applications.
To discover the basic capabilities of Predix, we will deploy a simple application that accesses a time-series and an authentication service. The following diagram shows the main components of the proposed architecture. On the cloud, we will deploy the authentication service and the time-series service. We then build our application on our local PC, and after having configured the manifest.yml, we are ready to deploy the application on the Predix cloud:
In the proposed exercise,...
MindSphere is a PaaS IoT platform that works on AWS or Azure, and it was created by Siemens. It supports data acquisition with existing systems such as Historian databases, MES, ERP, and SCADA systems. MindAccess IoT Value is the starting point to understand MindSphere; it provides a fleet manager to support our IoT fleet. MindSphere is equipped with development tools. To work with it, we need to install the CF CLI from https://github.com/cloudfoundry/cli . Like Predix, MindSphere has good support for the IoT TSDB, the file service, and the data acquisition gateway.
You can request free access to MindSphere at https://developer.mindsphere.io/.
As we mentioned before, there are more than 120 platforms for IoT. Most of these are specific to IoT and are not appropriate for I-IoT. We will compare a few of these platforms.
In this chapter, we learned how to configure the Predix application and how to acquire data. We also compared the Predix platform with other platforms. In the next chapters, we will look at the most common IoT solutions so that we can understand the main capabilities of the I-IoT real middleware.
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