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172 IoT Applications — Value Creation for Industry
Fig. 3.8 Iot supported interactions as part of a complex Cyber-Physical-System.
industrial systems with IoT systems. These “brownfield” use cases are all
targeted towards optimizing existing processes by decreasing the gap between
the real world and the virtual world. They are thus examples for an evolutionary
approach towards an “Industry 4.0” that builds upon IoT Technology.
As depicted in Figure 3.8 so called cyber-physical-systems in an industrial
environment are by definition heavily interconnected. They reflect their
physical interdependencies also by communication link and data exchange.
Technologies like sensor networks and RFID often builds the missing link in
such an environment. IoT technology delivers “smartness” and context awareness
to otherwise “dumb” objects and environments. It puts the human in the
loop of many otherwise ad-hoc and unstructured business processes.
As a motivating example of a very simple use case for such a system we
consider a mobile maintenance use case. In such a scenario a service technician
comes onto the site of a client and can identify all machinery parts easily
using RFID and ad-hoc device discovery. Based on this information he can
build an up-to-date image of the current system state that can be augmented
with historical and semantically interconnected data. He can further deploy
wireless measurement devices ad-hoc to gather missing parameters to guide
his diagnosis and maintenance strategy. Such an ad-hoc setting is an example
for the integration of federated heterogeneous sensor information as core of
an informed maintenance strategy with high immediate value coming from
IoT technology beyond high infrastructural investments [11].
3.4.1 Cost-effective Technical Integration of IoT Devices
A developer of IoT technology has to take various technical requirements into
account such as energy, communication bandwidth, communication topology