A Systems Approach to Real-World Deployment of Industrial Internet of Things

Deployment of the Internet of Things (IoT) in real industrial scenarios is fraught with unseen challenges and planning intricacies. The inside engineering and methodologies behind a successful Industrial IoT (IIoT) setup are seldom discussed. In this paper, we describe a systems approach to identify, integrate, and deploy the different IIoT modules in a bottom-up manner. The process that go from first identifying and labelling the various assets to be monitored, to their abstraction and integration for a given industrial scenario, forms the major crux of the work presented in this paper. We deployed several sensor nodes in the Offshore Renewable Energy Catapult site, located in Blyth, UK. Each sensor node monitored a specific asset and communicated via LoRaWAN to our local Data Hub. A simple query interface and visualisation dashboard allowed real-time data assessment and rapid asset monitoring. To make the proposed approach easy to comprehend and applicable to other scenarios, we extracted a minimal translational bottom-up flowchart. The systems approach described here offers a robust methodology to plan out a real-world IIoT deployment.