A new Industrial Internet Consortium testbed aims to tackle the inefficiency of scheduled preventative maintenance. With the real-time data flow of IIoT-enabled machines and components, predictive maintenance has the potential to make preventative maintenance obsolete.
The Industrial Internet Consortium (IIC) was founded by AT&T, Cisco, General Electric, IBM and Intel in 2014. The IIC is a non-profit organization working to set standards, define best practices and accelerate the adoption of IIoT technology. Their testbed program enables real-world manufacturers to test, research and tinker with industrial internet applications. The resulting case studies and data helps bring those applications to market faster. Examples of IIC testbeds include smart airline baggage management, connected vehicle urban traffic management and connected medical care.
The testbed is led by two companies that specialize in Industry 4.0 solutions: Plethora IIot and electronics company Xilinx. The main goal of the testbed is to evaluate machine learning techniques for predictive maintenance on real-world, high-volume production machinery.
The challenge is to detect and understand failures, to ultimately reduce downtime and increase energy efficiency. IIoT sensors can gather enormous amounts of real-time data, but critical analysis is required to maximize the usefulness of that data.
For more information on the IIC Testbed Program see, https://www.iiconsortium.org/test-beds.htm.