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Industrial Information Hub

The Industrial Information Hub (IIH) is a collection of Industrial Edge apps for data integration. It captures data at the automation level and provides it to the IT level of a factory.

Industrial Information Hub¶

The Industrial Information Hub (IIH) is a collection of Industrial Edge apps for data integration. It captures data at the automation level and provides it to the IT level of a factory.

The IIH can be used, together with other components, to integrate manufacturing data from the shopfloor all the way up to the cloud.

The future-proof solution for any industry¶

The IIH helps to transform a production facility into a smart factory by upgrading it with the latest Edge technology. The key features and design cornerstones are:

  • Connectivity
  • Semantic data access
  • Industrial security
  • Extensibility
  • Asset management

Connectivity¶

The IIH takes care of all data integration, from the shopfloor to the cloud. It gathers data through a wide range of available connectors and makes live data access possible on every layer up to the cloud (bidirectional).

Semantic data access¶

Many other data management systems based on MQTT simply provide a list of individual data points, but this approach comes with challenges as an unstructured list with often thousands of variables is complicated to use and retrieving data automatically is nearly impossible.

The IIH resolves this by mapping all variables into an OPC UA structure. This specification is highly standardized and any user can select the standard of their choice (in the form of a companion specification) from the Internet. This makes data retrieval much easier as there are assets for each individual machine with the corresponding signals inside. In addition, the user can then create different views of their data to organize it even better (for example a special folder for energy data).

Finally, the IIH has a built-in semantic knowledge graph. It is generated automatically from the OPC UA structure and can be queried. This allows other applications to retrieve information about machines directly and generically. This enables self-updating dashboards, automatic KPI calculation and much more.

Industrial security¶

The IIH puts data security first. It meets the highest security requirements and standards required in manufacturing and cloud computing. The end user has full control over their data, access and updates.

Extensibility¶

The IIH is not only vendor-independent but has a completely open APIs. End users can create new connectors for it and have full access to all APIs. This improves flexibility and offers the possibility to change to more modern components at a later time.

Asset management¶

The IIH offers a hierarchical Asset Model. This model can be used to organize the collected data.

Components and APIs¶

IIH Components¶

The IIH consists of several components - packaged as separate Industrial Edge applications to support different usage scenarios:

  • Common Configurator - the main user interface of the IIH. All configuration processes take place in this application.

  • IIH Essentials - a high performance data storage medium with synchronization capabilities to the cloud.

  • IIH Semantics - responsible for the semantic data model. It contains an OPC UA server and a Knowledge Graph and offers a GraphQL API for accessing this data. The component can synchronize its content with other IIH Semantics apps.

  • IIH Registry Service - a microservice to provide information about the running connectors on a device. This component has no user interface.

  • IIH Databus Gateway - a component required if a "Connectivity Suite" connector should send its variables to the Databus.

Connectors¶

In addition to these IIH components the various southbound connectivity tasks are addressed by "Connectors":

  • Connectivity Suite (CS) Connectors - The latest generation of connectors complies with the Siemens "Connectivity Suite" standard (Siemens Industry Online Support / Connectivity Suite). Configuration can be done using the Common Configurator. To be able to operate these with the IIH, the IIH Registry Service is required and, if necessary, the IIH Databus Gateway to send the data to the IE Databus.

  • IIH compliant Connectors - some connector are not Connectivity Suite compliant but are nonetheless supported by the IIH and can be configured using the Common Configurator.

  • Other Connectors - connectors which have been developed only for the use with the IE Databus. Data from these connectors can be used in the IIH but they can't be configured via the Common Configurator.

  • OPC UA - the IIH Semantics comes with built-in OPC UA capabilities and doesn't need an additional connector for retrieving data from existing OPC UA server instances.

APIs¶

The IIH offers the following interfaces for other components to use:

  • OPC UA Server (IIH Semantics) - the IIH Semantics offers an integrated OPC UA Server for read and write access to the configured model.

  • Graph QL API (IIH Semantics) - an API for retrieving data via the GraphQL query language.

  • Rest API (IIH Essentials) - interface to the data, asset model and configuration of the IIH Essentials.

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