BROWSING: Smart Factory

The industrial internet-of-things (IoT) is at the heart of France’s new 5G roadmap, unveiled late yesterday by the French electronic communications and postal regulatory authority (Arcep). The new plan, presented by Arcep chair Sébastien Soriano, flanked by secretaries of state for economic affairs and...

Siemens has founded an industrial IoT (IIoT) group of manufacturing and technology companies in Italy to expand the international reach of its MindSphere platform. The new MindSphere World Italy set-up follows a similar industrial grouping in Siemens home market, Germany. The Italian division will also...

GE Digital will integrate its Predix portfolio with Microsoft Azure’s cloud capabilities, and standardise its Predix solutions on Microsoft Azure, it has announced. GE and Microsoft said they will also work together under the terms of an expanded partnership on the development, marketing, and sales...

Operational technology (OT) and information technology (IT) have been living in two different worlds for a very long time. Historically, they have looked at things very differently. With the emergence of Internet-of-things (IoT) and industrial IoT (IIoT), however, the two worlds are being forced...

The latest index of countries’ progress against the UN's Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) makes for grim reading. No country is on track to achieve the targets, set out by the UN and ratified by its member states in 2015 as a plan to end...

In the final instalment in our industrial IoT trilogy with Hitachi, Greg Kinsey, in charge of the company's digital transformation business, says innovation is not available to pre-order and take-away, and the Japanese firm has set up like a Michelin-starred industrial consultancy to transform...

Rockwell Automation has added six new companies to its partner programme, organised to help industrial enterprises with digital transformation. “Industrial companies that want to implement smart manufacturing or other initiatives often need to work with multiple vendors,” said Rockwell in a statement. The Milwaukee-based firm...

Telemetry, data acquisition, SCADA — What do they mean, and how do they become part of IoT? Let’s try to sort it out. What is telemetry? Telemetry — the gathering of data from remote places for analysis and other purposes — is at the heart of...

Siemens and Alibaba have struck a deal to “foster” new growth in the industrial ‘internet of things’ (IIoT) market in China, the pair have announced. The deal will see Siemens’ MindSphere IoT platform made available on Alibaba Cloud in 2019, to enable enterprises in...

Nokia and Tencent will make research into 5G-enabled internet-of-things (IoT) applications for industry verticals including transportation, energy and manufacturing a major part of their new collaboration in China, based out of a new test lab in Shenzhen. The pair said at Mobile World Congress in...

The move to a ‘lights-out’ factory has already begun, but the developing transition requires an overhaul of industrial facilities, equipment, systems and people if it is to go the distance. Transformation of the manufacturing industry, or ‘vertical’ in service-provider parlance, must also make way...

The Industrial Internet Consortium (IIC) has established a ‘smart printing factory testbed’ in collaboration with Fujitsu, IBM, Real-Time Innovations (RTI) and Toshiba to develop technologies to help the printing industry automate production and maintenance processes. The IIC said the group is using the testbed to...

AT&T will go after the broad industrial ‘internet-of-things’ (IIoT) market with an expanded connectivity portfolio as it unfolds its new narrowband-IoT (NB-IoT) network across the US and Mexico through 2019. “We’re just getting started on unlocking the promise of the industrial internet of things for...

As we have seen already, through separate discussion of Hitachi’s approach to ‘predictive quality’ and ‘dynamic scheduling’, the digital transformation of industry is multi-faceted. There is a third way, apart from managing defects and bottlenecks, for industrial operatives to set about this change, the...

Microsoft has made its Azure IoT Edge service ‘generally available’, and added new categories including device management and security to its Azure IoT Edge catalogue.  It has also made Azure IoT Edge available on open source developer platform GitHub, which Microsoft acquired for $7.5 billion last...

According to the GSMA report, greater China will have 4.1 billion IIoT connections by that year Greater China is expected to reach 4.1 billion industrial internet of things (IIoT) connections by 2025, according to a new report by the GSMA. The report, dubbed "The Industrial IoT...

Where is the edge of the data network, where compute power increasingly resides? This is the question industrial operatives are asking, as they look to combine advanced connectivity technologies and analytics techniques to bring new intelligence to their systems and processes. It is the...

There are three strands to industrial transformation, reckons Hitachi Vantara, the digital change unit of Japanese hardware and software maker Hitachi. The point is to eliminate, or at least manage and reduce, downtime, bottlenecks, and defects. Greg Kinsey, the firm’s vice president, wants to deal...

Thousands of people pour into and out of high-rise office buildings each day, and each must be kept safe and secure. Two of the most significant challenges in accomplishing this are guard tour management and ensuring that all fire and safety equipment complies with...

Hitachi sets about the task of industrial transformation with its customers by posing three simple, but very pointed, questions. “What if you could predict and prevent production downtime? What if you could predict and prevent production bottlenecks? What if you could predict and prevent...

“If you are not investing in these technologies to drive your own product gains, know that your competitors are already doing so. If you haven’t started, you need to; the industrial IoT (IIoT) race has already begun.” This was the view from GE Digital...

The Industrial Internet Consortium (IIC) has mapped out a “continuum” of edge computing in industrial settings, with the ‘edge’ variously located at certain points of remove from the data source depending on the technical requirements of the use case. For simplicity, it summarises four...

The Industrial Internet Consortium (IIC) has issued a white paper with practical guidance on edge computing in industrial internet-of-things (IIoT) settings. The publication seeks to define edge computing architectural functions and drivers, highlight key use case considerations. The IIC paper, called IIC Introduction to Edge...

General Electric reckons the convergence of machines, data and analytics will contribute $10 to $15 trillion to global GDP in efficiency gains over the next two decades. It has spent at least $1 billion to develop its own Predix platform, like an industrial internet...