Internet of Things and Industrial Internet of Things Courses
This part of the FTT web site is devoted to the Internet of Things (IoT) and its industrial cousin Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT).
IoT involves a wide range of technologies and, at the systems level, has a bearing on and links with many engineering fields including Mechanical-Engineering, Electronics, Embedded systems Firmware and Middleware, Cloud Computing, Data Analytics and Machine Learning and Mobile telephony and networking.
Currently various projections for growth in the value of the IoT economic sector place the value of the IoT and IIoT sector at many hundreds of billions of dollars and compound annual growth rates in a range from 7% to 15%. Growth is fuelled partly by the availability of cheap wireless communication technologies and relatively inexpensive software development tools.
IIoT is a specialisation of these various technologies in the service of commercial applications involving, industrial chemical and process industry applications, manufacturing processes as well as logistics, for example. As well as the various technologies used in non-industrial applications IIoT needs to also consider technologies and standards such as OPC, UA, SCADA and iec 61131-3, Time Critical networking e.g. using EtherCAT or Powerlink. In addition networking protocols and standards such as PROFIBUS, MODBUS and CAN bus need to be taken into account.
IIoT has already demonstrated its usefulness in helping to deal with problems such as, for example, predictive and preventative maintenance, condition based monitoring of machines, production optimization, energy optimization, supply-chain optimization and uptime maximisationof manufacturing utilities .
Many consider that a healthy and thriving economy will include both service and manufacturing industries in roughly equal measure. IoT has many uses such as home automation, "smart city" applications and healthcare applications. IIoT is more specialised and, currently, appears to be destined to play a pivotal role in improving the efficiency, safety and productivity of industrial systems.