On the consumer-facing side of the technology business, buzz around the “Internet of Things” has been picking up a lot of juice lately. Witness the explanatory graphic (provided by Cisco) at http://bit.ly/ciscoiot as evidence of the effort underway in industry around this concept.

At its core, the whole idea of the “Internet of Things” is to literally have everything imaginable connected to a network so that information from all these connected “things” can be stored, transferred, analyzed and acted upon in new and, usually automated, ways via network connections with everything else.

Like most truly game-changing technologies, we’re talking about mixing nine parts awe-inspiring potential with at least one part unsettling creepiness, considering what could be wrought with this fantastic idea if used for the wrong purposes. For now, though, the reality may be somewhat less than awe-inspiring or creepy, but highly beneficial to business nonetheless. And a lot of the groundwork supporting the potential for the Internet of Things is being laid in the manufacturing industries.

Connected production

“There’s been an ‘intranet of things’ in manufacturing for years now,” says Tony Paine, president of Kepware ( www.kepware.com), a technology company in Yarmouth, Maine that develops communication and interoperability software for the automation industry. Explaining his statement, Paine points to the growing use of preventative and condition-based monitoring that are widely accepted, if not always implemented, by most manufacturers.

This connected approach to maintenance is very similar to the Internet of Things concept of “connecting a range of devices and systems together by putting sensors out in the field and retrofitting older equipment to pull in info and make decisions,” Paine says. “For example, if you have a system that’s supposed to run in a range from x to y, you can put in a temperature sensor to see if it goes out of range before it runs out of spec. Measuring vibrations to detect out of spec operations is another example.”

Taking the idea a step further are manufacturers looking to connecting all these devices for higher-level decision-making by connecting them to manufacturing execution systems (MES) or enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems for multiple plant connectivity from the device to the enterprise level.

“We used to talk about islands of automation,” says Mike Hannah, product development manager, Ethernet & Infrastructure, for Rockwell Automation ( www.Rockwellautomation.com ) in Milwaukee. “That’s now evolving into a discussion about how does one plant talk to another plant—not just one part of a plant talking to another part. The growth of devices on Ethernet in the manufacturing sector is accelerating rapidly. Part of the reason for this is the desire to have data available across the enterprise.”

As cutting edge as the practices of condition-based monitoring and sensor-to-ERP connectivity may be, they’re not the be-all-end-all that some people see for the “Internet of Things” as it applies to manufacturing.

“This is not just about connecting smart devices, this is about modeling all the things in your manufacturing world so that it’s easy to remix them in new ways to build new applications,” says Russ Fadel, chief executive officer of Thingworx ( www.thingworx.com), a two-year-old company located in Exton, Pa. The company combines the key functionality of real-time data, mashups, search, social media and the semantic web, and applies it to any process that involves people, systems, devices and other real world “things.”

ON THE WEB: Internet of Things Evolves. Read more stories and see video commentary on the Internet of Things from Automation World editors. Visit bit.ly/ related_022

To illustrate manufacturing modeling concepts within the Internet of Things, Fadel says to consider what it would be like to have the ability to feed the Google weather forecast into your facility’s energy management application so it can start cooling the building down or heating it up a day in advance.

“That kind of automated, connected response could save you, say, 3 percent on your utility bill,” Fadel says. “The ability to remix people and systems to interact with radical equality—this will be the source of some unexpected innovation. For manufacturers, the Internet of Things is not just about connecting your car to your alarm clock, it’s about creating a competitive advantage.”

Impact on automation technology

At first glance, the Internet of Things concept can appear as yet another vendor attempt to get end users to install more products they may not really need in the hopes of achieving some kind of business acceleration nirvana. In reality, it’s the end users who are driving ...