The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT)

The Industrial  INTERNET OF THINGS(IIoT) 

The Industrial Internet of Things originally described the IoT (Internet of Things) as it is used across several industries such as manufacturing, logistics, oil and gas, transportation, energy/utilities, mining and metals, aviation and other industrial sectors and in use cases which are typical to these industries. 

 

This distinction obviously is somewhat artificial and on all levels there are overlaps. The fastest growing categories of IoT use cases, for instance, are cross-industry. Moreover, although some technologies, architectural frameworks and applications across all IoT layers differ (edge computing and fog computing are typical in Industrial IoT, there are different types of network and connectivity tools, IIoT gateways serve other purposes, Industrial IoT platforms support other use cases than IoT platforms overall, digital twins are mainly about industrial markets, the use cases for augmented reality are not the same and so forth) between Industrial IoT and Consumer IoT an average large IIoT project will leverage several forms of connectivity and solutions of which some are used in consumer IoT as well.

GE and Industrial IoT as a synonym of Industrial Internet

The Industrial Internet of Things also has a second meaning to complicate things. Industrial giant GE coined the term Industrial Internet which really describes industrial transformation in the connected context of machines, cyber-physical systems, advanced analytics, AI, people, cloud, edge computing and so forth.

Although you won’t find the term cyber-physical systems (essentially Industrial IoT in the first sense in action and in a context of autonomous and semi-autonomous decisions and actionable intelligence) we added it because Industrial Internet in many ways is the same as Industry 4.0 (more about that and the links between IIoT and Industrial Internet at the bottom of this article).

What does this have to do with Industrial IoT? Well, GE and the Industrial Internet Consortium or IIC it (co-)founded decided that the Industrial Internet of Things or IIoT was a synonym for the Industrial Internet.