Smart Factories and IT Monitoring

Transcription

1 Whitepaper Smart Factories and IT Monitoring Is Today s IT Monitoring Smart Enough for a Smart World?

2 Contents Introduction... 3 What will be the role of IT in this new, smart world? 4 What are the next steps?... 5 There is a bumpy road ahead... 6 Smart factories simply require smart monitoring... 7 MIDAS boom EM... 9 Detect Changes and Prevent Problems... 9 Intelligent Agents Monitor Production Sites Leverage Investments in ITSM Infrastructure Conclusion Contact Blue Elephant Systems Specialist for IT Operational Safety Author: Joachim Hörnle, July Copyright 2014, Blue Elephant Systems GmbH. All rights reserved. No part of this document may be copied, reproduced, translated, transferred to an electronic medium or machine-readable language without Blue Elephant Systems GmbH s express prior agreement in written form. The information contained here is non-binding. All product and service names are the property of the respective trademark owner. BLUE ELEPHANT SYSTEMS and the BLUE ELEPHANT SYSTEMS logo are registered with the US Patent & Trademark Office. All other product or service names are the property of the respective owner. Should you have questions regarding these conditions, please contact us via at info@blue-elephant-systems.com. BLUE ELEPHANT SYSTEMS GmbH, Zettachring 2, Stuttgart, Germany. BLUE ELEPHANT SYSTEMS GmbH Page 2 / 12

3 Introduction Smart factories hold a huge potential for innovation. Industrie 4.0 refers to a fourth industrial revolution in which everything is about smart factories. Industrie 4.0 opens up new ways in creating value and novel business models. Even in business, smart is the new sexy. Literally everything is going to be smart in the future: smart homes, smart buildings, smart cities and smart factories. No doubt, there is a lot of hype involved. In addition, all of these trends are still at very early stages. It is unclear when the predicted benefits will become a reality, but many of them will. Especially the trend towards smart factories holds huge potential for innovation. To put it crudely: if even smart phones have such an impact on us, how could one overestimate the potential of smart factories. Interestingly, representatives from the German industry together with the German government have coined a different term for smart factories: Industrie 4.0. The term Industrie 4.0 refers to a vision of a "fourth industrial revolution". This vision is about smart factories, which allow individual customer requirements to be met. This means that even one-off items can be manufactured profitably. For example, in a smart factory, dynamic business and engineering processes enable last-minute changes to production and deliver the ability to respond flexibly to disruptions and failures on behalf of suppliers. End-to-end transparency is provided over the manufacturing process, facilitating optimized decision-making. Industrie 4.0 will also result in new ways of creating value and novel business models. In particular, it will provide start-ups and small businesses with the opportunity to develop and provide downstream services. In addition, predicted use-cases for Industrie 4.0 will address and solve some of the challenges facing the world today such as resource and energy efficiency, urban production and demographic change. Industrie 4.0 enables continuous resource productivity and efficiency gains to be delivered across the entire value network. It allows work to be organized in a way that takes demographic change and social factors into account. Smart assistance systems release workers from having to perform routine tasks, enabling them to instead focus on creative, value-added activities. BLUE ELEPHANT SYSTEMS GmbH Page 3 / 12

4 What will be the role of IT in this new, smart world? IT is the key to Industrie 4.0. Embedded systems enable the physical and the virtual world to converge. Cyber-physical systems (CPS) bridge the gap between the worlds of computing, IT and physics. Information technology is the key element in the factory of the future. The fourth industrial revolution will be driven by the increased use of information and communications technology as part of production processes. Looking at the projected value proposition, almost all benefits of smart factories are based on the tight integration of hardware and software resources. Smart factories will heavily utilize virtualization, mobile communication and other recent technologies and approaches. As a result, not only are new intelligent products and production systems possible, but also new forms of intelligent services. Today, IT is in the middle of a fundamental change process. More and more IT infrastructures and services are provided through smart networks. Cloud computing as the modern model of network computing offers various economic and technical benefits and enables new and very promising models for service provisioning. In conjunction with ever-increasing miniaturization and the overwhelming and roaring success of the Internet, this trend is ushering in a world where ubiquitous computing is becoming a reality. Powerful, autonomous microcomputers, so called embedded systems, are increasingly being wirelessly networked with each other and with the Internet. This is results in the physical and virtual worlds converging. The accumulation areas where the confluence of the physical reality and cyberspace is visible are so called cyber-physical systems (CPS). CPS are engineered systems that are built from, and depend upon, the seamless integration of computational algorithms and physical components. A CPS is characterized by three fundamental and deeply interwoven behaviors: computation, communication, and control. Many complex systems bridge the fields of computation, information technology, and physics. Computing, information technology, and communication systems are often collectively referred to as cyber systems, and they directly interact with the world around us. These cyber-physical systems are engineered to continuously and dynamically interact with their environment through the coupling of distributed computational and physical components. The science is founded on traditional embedded systems design and expands into more meaningful and complex systems, making it a field with significant potential for innovation and social impact. In a nutshell: These systems enable the next generation of technology, lead a revolution in system-level design, and will transform engineering systems, like the Internet did for information. They will drive innovation and competition in sectors such as agriculture, energy, transportation, building design and automation, healthcare, and BLUE ELEPHANT SYSTEMS GmbH Page 4 / 12

5 CPS form the basis of Industry 4.0: they connect resources, information, objects and people for the "Internet of Things and Services". manufacturing. This new intelligent technical systems constitute the basis of Industry 4.0. This is because they communicate wirelessly via internet type of networks but carry out real, physical processes. In this way, production processes are interlinked in order to create a smart factory, and largely organize themselves. In addition, new Internet protocols such as IPv6 provide sufficient addresses to enable universal direct networking of smart objects via the Internet. This means that for the first time ever, it is now possible to network resources, information, objects and people to create the Internet of Things and Services. The journey towards Industrie 4.0 and smart factories will be an evolutionary process. Current basic technologies and existing experience will have to be adapted to the specific requirements of manufacturing engineering and innovative solutions for new locations and new markets will have to be explored. What are the next steps? The convergence of operational (OT) and information technology (IT) promotes the visibility of information and process management in the company at a glance. One of the immediate steps towards Industrie 4.0 and smart factories is the increasing alignment of operational technology (OT) and information technology (IT). According to Gartner OT "is hardware and software that detect or cause a change of state through the direct monitoring or control of physical devices, processes and events in the enterprise. Traditional hard-wired electromechanical, proprietary, single-purpose or stand-alone OT systems are rapidly being replaced by more-complex OT software and firmware products that use common IT components. We call this "convergence. IT/OT integration promotes a single view of enterprise information and process management to help ensure that every person, sensor, switch or other device has the right information, in the right format, at the right time. As OT products take on more commercial software infrastructure and underpinnings, simply getting OT to interface efficiently with IT systems at a process level is difficult enough for many companies. Getting IT and OT to work together to maximize business efficiency while avoiding negative consequences, risks and pitfalls in the process makes the task even more challenging." In the next years, the role of IT in production and manufacturing will change significantly. Not only the number of IT components in production will increase tremendously, but also the total IT penetration of production will far exceed today s standards. The Internet of Things and Services will change manufacturing fundamentally in terms of organization, technology and processes. Approaches and technologies like SOA, virtualization, cloud computing, machine (M2M) BLUE ELEPHANT SYSTEMS GmbH Page 5 / 12

6 communication and many other recent IT innovations can be found on the shop floor in the near future. Production will simply get another critical infrastructure. Major processes in production will directly depend on the availability and performance of IT components and services. There is a bumpy road ahead The IT/OT convergence has its advantages and disadvantages: the complexity of the systems reduces the costs and risks and shortens project turnaround times. On the one hand side, the convergence of IT and OT is very promising. It can reduce costs, minimize risk, realize projects sooner and generate incremental revenue. But it also contributes to the continuously increasing complexity of systems used in production. This leads to an excessive demand of IT and opens the door for innovative technologies able to manage complexity and provide the appropriate safety and security. IT/OT alignment involves aligning and integrating traditional information technology with devices, sensors and software used to monitor and control physical equipment. IT and OT integration promotes a single view of enterprise information management, an essential element for the high-performance workplace in which every person, sensor, switch or other device has the right information in the right format at the right time to make the best possible decision. The benefits of IT/OT alignment include reduced costs, fewer risks and shortened project timelines: Opportunities for cost reduction in the IT sector. Opportunities for risk reduction and improved cyber security. Opportunities to reduce risks and maturities in integration projects. Cost reduction opportunities can involve costs for future integration projects, the cost of software procurement and management over its life cycle, cost of software licensing, external and internal costs of software support, IP networking, network management, and IT operations. Risk reduction comes from less malware intrusion and fewer internal errors. Cybersecurity can be enhanced if IT security resources are shared, seconded or combined with OT staff to plan and implement holistic IT/OT security. Additional risk reduction comes from minimizing errors in OT software through version control, patching and upgrading by using the tools and processes derived from managing IT products. In addition, if a shared set of standards and platforms is in place, organizations can look to reduce risks for future integration projects and shorten their timeline. Hybrid projects relying on IT and OT investment will meet fewer obstacles if BLUE ELEPHANT SYSTEMS GmbH Page 6 / 12

7 staffers have an agreed-on approach and share a common set of standards and architecture plans. The IT/OT convergence calls for a new approach of monitoring. As one of the important and immediate consequences of the IT/OT convergence, manufacturing will inherit one of the basic necessities of IT: efficient and effective IT management. The open, dynamic and networked nature of smart factories poses a major safety and complexity challenge for manufacturing. Therefore smart factories demand a modern approach in monitoring. Smart factories simply require smart monitoring Smart monitoring has the following attributes: A hybrid infrastructure leads to holistic monitoring. If the monitoring footprint corresponds to the monitored environment, the monitoring is lean. Monitoring is flexible, if it supports the dynamics of the factory. Holistic monitoring: Technology now needs to provide holistic monitoring for hybrid infrastructures inside smart factories where various types of systems collaborate in order to generate business value. This hybrid infrastructure consists of different types of IT systems ranging from simple to complex software systems running on various platforms: embedded systems to data center servers. All of the IT systems may collaborate with complex mechatronic systems, appliances, devices and other operational technology on the shop floor. In addition to enhancing the enterprise s visibility of information regarding the state or efficiency of subsystems in smart factories, various sources of information within the shop floor need to be monitored and analyzed. Lean monitoring: The footprint of monitoring in terms of resource consumption - CPU, memory, disk space but also with respect to the physical size and last but not least the price of the monitoring system - need to match the type of environment to be monitored. For instance, to monitor an infrastructure where embedded systems and CPS are used on the shop floor, it is inadequate to use a traditional, datacenter type of server for monitoring. Flexible monitoring: The smart factory approach is about dynamic collaboration of modularized machines, robots, IT systems and other equipment on the shop floor. Monitoring needs to support the dynamics and volatility by providing flexible monitoring which can quickly adopt to structural and functional changes. BLUE ELEPHANT SYSTEMS GmbH Page 7 / 12

8 The growth of IT components requires a scalable monitoring. Monitoring must also support future trends. An operational concept is required, which maps the dependency of virtualized objects to the physical components. Scalable monitoring: Today the IT in production is both rather specialized and small. Not only because of the advent of the Internet of Things (IoT), but also due to the increasing distribution and use of technologies like OPC-UA and protocols like MQTT, COAP and XMPP, we will see a massive growth in IT components in production. IT monitoring is the best practice to ensure the safety and availability of a distributed IT environment. Therefore, smart monitoring needs to scale up to millions of components to be monitored. Ubiquitous monitoring: As part of Industrie 4.0 and the trend towards smart factories, intelligent and IT-fueled systems will be spread over the production environment. Approaches such as Computing Everywhere or Ubiquitous Computing and mobile technologies are hitting the shop floor. Therefore ubiquitous monitoring needs to be available to support the more distributed and pervasive nature of systems in the context of smart factories. In addition the IT in production needs an operational concept, which addresses the major needs of this very specialized IT infrastructure. For example, the IT resources in production are not another bunch of IT components to be managed or monitored, but it is important to reflect their relationship with production processes as well as the dependency of virtualized objects on physical components. BLUE ELEPHANT SYSTEMS GmbH Page 8 / 12

9 MIDAS boom EM MIDAS boom EM integrates the monitoring of today into the production environment of tomorrow. MIDAS boom EM is a distributed monitoring system with an agent running on CPS and embedded systems. MIDAS boom EM (Embedded Monitoring) is a smart monitoring system capable of monitoring the factory of today and tomorrow. It integrates modern and full-featured IT monitoring with the flexible and holistic surveillance of production environments. MIDAS boom EM combines the monitoring of the performance and availability of IT services, applications and server systems with the ability to monitor machines, devices and appliances on the shop floor. Parameters of condition in machinery are checked and analyzed using distributed and intelligent sensors. The convergence of sensor networks and enterprise IT monitoring enables companies to move towards a smart infrastructure, where for instance complex and distributed mechatronic systems need to be operated. In addition, MIDAS boom EM helps production organizations to address the safety issues in smart factories, where the availability and performance of all components need to be guaranteed which are important to production processes, regardless if cyber or physical components are involved. MIDAS boom EM is a distributed monitoring system. The MIDAS boom EM agent is able to run on cyber physical systems (CPS) and tiny embedded systems. The agent can be equipped with a broad range of sensors for voltage, humidity, water level, pressure, or other physical quantities. The collected information is consolidated, preprocessed and used for threshold monitoring and alerting as well as for history analysis. MIDAS boom EM enables and offers a single pane of glass for managing the health of a complex cyber-physical environment. It uses all MIDAS boom enterprise grade capabilities, such as automation, highly optimized communication and security concepts. Detect Changes and Prevent Problems The MIDAS boom EM agent reads various sources, and combines end-to-end monitoring with sensors that measure physical quantities to a holistic monitoring. The MIDAS boom EM agent integrates the monitoring of a broad range of event sources. It is capable of intercepting events using arbitrary sources such as log files, SNMP traps, APIs, CLIs and so on. In addition the agent combines classical end-to-end IT monitoring capabilities with sensors that measure physical quantities. Measured data such voltage, pressure or temperature samples becomes the trigger for incident management as it is true for traditional IT events. This matches the requirements of monitoring complex mechatronic systems almost perfectly. In addition it is not only possible to determine the condition of machinery while in operation, but to use this type of holistic monitoring for remote service management. MIDAS boom EM can be used to create intelligent assistant systems that support human users of automation systems to handle increasing system complexity and to avoid non-value adding activities. MIDAS boom EM enables proactive BLUE ELEPHANT SYSTEMS GmbH Page 9 / 12

10 fault detection and notification. It is driving profitability through automated event and problem management as well as analytics. Intelligent Agents Monitor Production Sites The MIDAS boom EM agent operates autonomously as a human operator, but consumes fewer resources. MIDAS boom EM is a distributed monitoring system, consisting of a collection of software agents that monitor and control an IT or physical environment. The MIDAS boom EM agent is able to simulate the behavior of a human operator who acts according to the operations manual. The intelligent agent operates autonomously based on policies, which capture the requirements in terms of monitoring. As an intelligent assistant system the MIDAS boom EM utilizes the agent to notify both, the local maintenance crew and/or the centralized control room. Superfluous delays can be avoided, especially in emergency situations. As the MIDAS boom EM agent runs on tiny autonomous microcomputers, so called embedded systems or cyber-physical-systems, it matches the characteristics of smart factories in terms of resource consumption, size and price of a monitoring system. The requirements of smart monitoring are also reflected at the communication level. MIDAS boom is based on a lean communication stack, enabling the product to work efficiently over low bandwidth lines. As a lean and distributed monitoring system, MIDAS boom fulfills all requirements to scale up to IoT environments to be monitored. Leverage Investments in ITSM Infrastructure MIDAS boom EM increases the benefits of investment in ITSM and ITIL through the integration of tools in the field of incident, problem and event management. IT Service Management (ITSM) and ITIL first evolved in the late 1980s and have now become firmly established as the de facto industry guidelines for the provision of quality IT services. They are used by thousands of IT organizations worldwide and are based on current best practice as used by some of the leading in-house and outsourced IT service provider organizations. MIDAS boom EM leverages the investment into ITSM or ITIL by integrating with the appropriate tools in incident, problem or event management. As an example data from sensors, which exceed a certain threshold, become events, which in turn may become incidents. At various levels it is possible to preprocess, correlate and enrich the management information and to use it for notification purposes or for analysis. BLUE ELEPHANT SYSTEMS GmbH Page 10 / 12

11 Conclusion The convergence of OT and IT makes factories smart and requires a new monitoring, as it is offered by the consistent approach of MIDAS boom EM. In spite of all initial issues, technology teething problems and other obstacles, the factory of tomorrow will be smart. Initiatives such as Industrie 4.0 and smart factories will be successful and transform production and manufacturing significantly. As an immediate consequence, we will see a convergence of IT and operational technology (OT), a massive growth in IT components in production and an increasing dependency of production processes on the performance and availability of IT services and components. Experts from both IT and OT acknowledge that one of the major success factors of the factory of tomorrow is the ability to ensure the appropriate operational efficiency and safety. Therefore, smart monitoring is simply the requirement of establishing Industrie 4.0 and smart factories as mainstream approaches. Companies like Vodafone and Swiss Post have decided for MIDAS boom because of the consistent application of the smart monitoring approach. BLUE ELEPHANT SYSTEMS GmbH Page 11 / 12

12 Contact If you would like to know more about the correlation of the Internet of Things and IT monitoring, please visit send us an at or call us at Blue Elephant Systems Specialist for IT Operational Safety Blue Elephant Systems GmbH is an international operating company, developing and implementing software to improve the IT operational safety. Large IT infrastructures can be controlled and monitored, analyzed and evaluated. The company s goal is to optimize the use of IT and to achieve the maximum operational reliability. The MIDAS Product Family optimizes and expands the usage of HP Operations Manager (HPOM), MIDAS boom automatically monitors heterogeneous IT infrastructures, and MOSCITO is a management information system for a company s managerial staff. Blue Elephant Systems GmbH is located in Stuttgart, Germany, and joined by Blue Elephant Systems Inc., based in Tuscaloosa, AL, U.S.A. BLUE ELEPHANT SYSTEMS GmbH Page 12 / 12