A session at the 2019 ARC Industry Forum in Orlando, Florida focused on leveraging analytics and industrial IoT-enabled solutions to digitally transform oil & gas operations.

Enter Project Haystack; an open (and open source), vendor-independent initiative to provide contextualization to the large amounts of data being generated by operational technology (OT)-level systems in the building automation and smart cities space.

In May, ARC Advisory Group hosted a meeting of the European Digital Transformation Council (DTC), and Peter Kwaspen from Shell gave a presentation on the company’s digitalization approach to asset management of instrumentation.

End users in industries with hazardous environments will continue to deploy specialized automation products and systems designed to prevent electrical or other sparking.

Increasingly, from smart homes to connected automobiles, consumers are being exposed to an environment of intelligent products and systems. Moreover, factory production lines, process plants for energy and utilities, and smart cities will depend on cyber-physical systems to self-monitor; optimize; even run infrastructure, transportation, and buildings autonomously.

Industry 4.0 and its digitalization aligns with the methodologies of Lean Six Sigma to help accelerate continuous improvement.

Manufacturing continues to rely on human labor, however, this reliance has drawbacks.  These include a shortage of workers with the appropriate skills and the inherent variability in the way individual workers perform, with human-induced errors not uncommon. The best operators can be created with technology.

Industrial systems share many of the same vulnerabilities as information systems and are subject to the same threats.  However, the consequences may be very different and, in some cases, more severe.  This makes industrial cybersecurity an imperative for the asset owner, who ultimately must bear the consequences of an adverse event.

For the last two years there has been increasing discussion about OPC UA over TSN (Time-Sensitive Networking) providing a common Ethernet network from the sensor to the cloud.

The NEXT conference spotlighted the fact that in addition to the core products, subsidiary Hitachi Vantara brings a modern IoT platform, advanced software, data management and analytics solutions, and a unique edge-to-core-to-cloud architecture solution.