The market requirements for industrial systems are changing rapidly with the growing acceptance of the concept of the Industrial Internet-of-Things (I-IoT) and there is a growing demand for connected, always online devices. This is forcing a need to move to new disruptive modern manufacturing paradigms to enable:
- Reduced lost production time due to equipment downtime
- Improved equipment operating efficiency
- Improved inventory and supplychain management through integrated realtime systems
- Secure remote access to operating data, on-demand by multiple 3rd parties
- “Supervisory” processing closer to the devices, (edge intelligence)
- Adding new features and components to existing industrial systems over the entire operating life, i.e. “future proofing”
The Paradigm for the Future of Industrial Equipment Manufacturing
At aicas, we have designed the Jamaica-IoT app store and application framework to fit with this new industrial equipment paradigm. Jamaica-IoT is built on the strengths of our highly scalable, optimised, realtime platform to deliver a foundation to I-IoT applications and services. The Jamaica-IoT framework enables secure over-the-air downloads of latest applications and services for prognostic or predictive maintenance based on up-to-date machine learning software versions. Getting the best performance out of the CPU and benefiting from hardware acceleration, whilst granting the end-to-end security, is enabled by the Jamaica-IoT framework.
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Some reasons for the paradigms shifts are:
- A single industrial automation supplier, even the largest ones, can no longer expect to be able to provide solutions for all of their customers, if they want to be competitive in I-IoT. The life expectancy of the equipment is measured in decades.
- The flexibility to update the software and hardware with new components and applications extends the life of the equipment, enabling the supplier to stay competitive. The cost of managing multiple versions and types of equipment, and thus multiple versions and types of software, grows exponentially with the number of permutations.
- The ability to update OTA, coupled with standardized software platform(s), reduces the permutations from exponential to linear or flat. Increasing the margin for the supplier, while enabling the supplier to innovate across their entire product line.
The Jamaica-IoT application framework makes two significant departures from the traditional monolithic firmware development cycle: it expects all applications and components to be loaded from external storage; and it uses a modern programming language and runtime environment.
Software developed for traditional monolithic firmware uses third generation programming languages. Although these languages have served well, they were never intended to be used in an application framework paradigm. The core language used by the application framework is the java programming language and the Realtime Specification for Java (RTSJ). Jamaica-IoT is the best choice to make the shift to the app store application framework paradigm and their future success:
Industrial IoT encompasses a large and varied set of messaging protocols. Jamaica-IoT supports a variety of peer-to-peer, cloud-based messaging, and client-server protocols. New protocols can be added dynamically as downloadable components.
The Application Management Service (AMS) enables signature verified secure download, installation and execution of components and applications. The AMS provides runtime API access control list verification, and CPU and memory resource limits monitoring and management.