Blog

Welcome to the Internet of Things (IoT) revolution, a time when intelligence will be embedded everywhere, and synthetic devices and systems will increasingly make decisions. In this era of IoT, there will be billions of devices communicating with each other: analyzing, interacting, measuring, responding and initiating it all without any human input. To see how this future is unfolding, we will examine the IoT growth picture in three waves.

IOT’S FIRST WAVE: MEASUREMENT AND TRACKING

We are now in the middle of the first wave of IoT. On the consumer side, we have wearables and devices that measure our pulse and heart rate, track how far we have walked in the past day, try to predict our body rhythm and activate an alarm, and we also have systems that listen, measure and, when necessary, provide alerts at various points in our home.

On the business side, we have sensors embedded in almost every major industrial asset, from generators and turbines to pumps, grids and drilling equipment. These sensors are used to measure more specific aspects of a system’s performance. They measure many environmental and process-specific things like temperature and pressure, and store these measurements for subsequent human analysis.

The solution we offer as Cerrus for this first wave is OSIsoft Pi System, with which you can collect all your existing and new sensor data, store it and keep it for a long time, view it instantly with Pi Vision and integrate it with all your top systems (ERP, MES, BI etc.).

IOT SECOND WAVE: MODELING AND FORECASTING

In some areas, we are slowly moving into the second wave. Data captured from existing IoT and automation devices is being used to model and predict the behavior of the environment, the devices themselves, and other systems to predict the future.

For example, consumer wearables that simply monitor heart rate and pulse can now catch an anomaly with measurements. These devices will evolve further to become wearable doctors that will instead provide a full diagnosis and recommendations.

For this to happen, more intelligence will need to be built into these devices, such as more sensors and environmental inputs. The cognitive capabilities of the devices themselves or the networks they connect to will include language, the ability to read and process inputs such as photos and streaming video. Imagine a wearable that tracks what you eat, understands what it is, calculates its size and hence caloric intake, and uses this information to alert you to everything from dietary violations to the accidental ingestion of an allergic food item that could trigger an attack.

In the business world, we will not only see machines that monitor basic elements of performance, but also machines that use these first-order data streams to develop deep predictive models that look for higher-level interactions of measured quantities such as vibration, temperature, and so on.

We will also see networked systems that not only sense but act in an increasingly complex way. These systems will include drones, unmanned aerial vehicles, self-driving vehicles, and increasingly sophisticated factory and warehouse bots that use image processing to detect objects and sort products and packages.

For the second wave, Cerrus is responding to your modeling and forecasting needs in various areas with our partner solutions. On the one hand, on top of the instant calculation and analysis features offered by the Pi system, we enable the modeling of your data through Artificial Intelligence algorithms with the integration of Sparkcognition products. We also protect your systems against cyber threats and operational anomalies in real time with Nozomi Networks’ ScadaGuardian.

IOT THIRD WAVE: ONE TRILLION FULLY AUTONOMOUS DEVICES

In the third wave, the true potential of IoT will be realized. We will have unlimited, easy to replicate, distributed and converged network intelligence powering cognitive, fully autonomous devices.

Sensors will become incredibly powerful, not only because of the capabilities of the hardware, but also because of highly intelligent AI algorithms that will be able to combine information from the underlying sensors into a coherent, detailed and complex picture of reality. This will provide a picture that goes far beyond what humans can construct with their eyes, ears, smell and touch.

It will be a world most deeply perceived by the smart devices that inhabit it. The people who make these devices will largely be unable to experience this reality.

This third wave of IoT will include autonomous and mobile systems that sense and avoid conflict in distributed, real-world scenarios. Think, for example, of algorithms powered to perform their ever-increasing functions, from fleets of hundreds of thousands of autonomous aircraft, to emergency medical supplies, to reaching police and paramedics in cities.

At Cerrus, we recognize that data is the most important resource for such future developments, which is why all the solutions we offer you are data-driven solutions that support each other in a series and prepare your infrastructures for the future. We are working and will continue to work hard to collect, properly store, protect and enrich your data with business analytics and artificial intelligence algorithms.