IIoT The Unified Namespace take zero
alright so in this video we're gonna go over a concept that we've referred to
all the time in our videos which is the unified namespace so I I get two
questions number one what is the unified namespace and number two what what does
it look like how do you build the new unifying namespace where does it live
okay so I'm going to talk about the archetype unified namespace matters
first okay number one in previous videos we've touched on this if you guys are
familiar with the automation stack right the way that data used to fly up the go
up the stack we had multiple connections discrete connections between disparate
applications so what does that mean in the industry 3.0 days I would have data
come from the PLC that would go to the HMI that would then be passed to the
SCADA system or it would go from PLC to SCADA SCADA and mes would interact only
the only the two of them would interact and the ERP system would occasionally
interact with the mes system okay if at some point I wanted to get information
from the ERP system into the SCADA system I would have to do two things I
would have to connect the ERP system to the mes system whatever specific new
data the SCADA system wanted and then I would have to map it from the mes system
to the SCADA system okay so what ends up happening is as my organized as my
organization grows I end up having thousands tens of thousands hundreds of
thousands connections between various nodes in my system okay in order for us
to be able to scale and that is scale and enterprise implementation in order
for us to fully leverage IOT and industry 4.0 concepts and digitally
transform a business then what we have to do is change this bastardization in
terms of the way that we connect applications together we do that by
creating unified namespace alright so what we do
we treat all applications we treat everything in the plant and on the plant
floor as a node in the system all right so what ends up happening is our PLC's
publish their data into a unified namespace okay
the SCADA system and the HMI well we actually have a discreet connection here
but the SCADA system and the HMI get their information from the unified
namespace the SCADA system may process it and then post that information back
into the unified namespace okay the mes system will then grab its
information that it needs to do all of its post processing of data and it will
then publish it back into the unified namespace okay
the ERP system will then grab its information from the unified namespace
do post processing and publish back in same thing with inventory management
there'll be locations in our namespace for inventory management warehouse
management system and for cloud or machine learning okay
the unified namespace is the structure of all of our business data in one place
okay it is its it is literally the unified namespace is the it is all data
for our entire business in one place for all applications to be able to consume
from so if I wanted to add a new piece of software later on down the road
which was going to do let's say shipping prediction so let's do that so let's say
I want to create this will be our optimization software I don't even know
if this exists but let's say a new piece of software comes out that is our
shipping optimization software and it needs information ok here's here's the
information that shipping optimization we need it would need to know
information from the ERP system that is who the client is and where it's got to
get shipped to ok that's going to come from ERP
it's going to need where I'm out warehouse mate information from the
warehouse management system it is going to need information from the mes system
let's say we I don't have the full the complete order fulfilled I need to know
what is the status of the orders that are in progress right now okay so I'm
going to need information from the mes system
I might need information from the edge okay is the machine currently running
right now is it not currently running right now I may need information
directly from the edge the shipping optimization software in in industry 3.0
we would have to install our new shipping optimization software and then
we would have to build discrete connections between the shipping
optimization software in the WMS or we would create a whole new database off
here that would collect information for all that software so the shipping
optimization software can consume it or we could use an IOT architecture and all
we would do is just plug our shipping optimization software into our namespace
that could be over web service it could be over mqtt it could be over whatever
and whatever protocol it talks and we can point it to the information it needs
to consume and then the shipping optimization software can post process
and send it back into the unified namespace that's the concept of the
unified namespace the most important the most important element of the unified
namespace and is that it is a it's a stepping stone to get us to the Holy
Grail okay and what is the Holy Grail the Holy Grail is that our process our
business processes are closed loop that is that we can collect information about
the state of our business in real time put it in one location plug it into the
cloud into our machine learning algorithm so we can plug it into the
cloud our machine learning algorithms are gonna learn about our business in
real time make predictions or recommendations on how to improve the
process in real time and push back those recommendations those recommendations
may mean hey we've just determined that our PLC code is not
okay our scan rates can be improved by 16 or 18 milliseconds per scan if we
make these three changes to the code this machine learning could spit that
back into the unified namespace and push it to the edge in real-time we could the
machine learning could push back into the unified namespace and push it to mes
in real time in terms of hey let's go ahead and break let's go ahead and break
this worker order out into three separate production runs and run them on
these other two machines there's there's a whole host of things that we're trying
to accomplish with machine learning that we can't even begin to do until we do
this until we generate the unified namespace okay so not only is it
incredibly efficient I mean this is the most this is the optimal way to
architect your business infrastructure it is the step that you need to
ultimately get to this holy grail which so many companies are investing millions
and millions of dollars in machine learning and AI and they're wondering
whether projects are failing well I'll tell you what I'm going to tell you why
your projects are failing right now you need to listen to this they're failing
because you don't have this so what's happening is that you're bringing in
really really smart people like our engineers like the Accenture group like
a whole host other companies out there that do machine learning and you're
saying I want to stream dimensional data and mes data into my cloud into my
machine learning algorithm well you know what you're doing you're taking the PLC
a PLC you're connecting it to you know AWS Greengrass instance that's running a
lambda function to normalize the data so this one PLC streams up into the cloud
you're then making an explicit connection between your mes system and
your machine learning algorithm you're actually doing explicit connections for
every single node you have in your organization you're not taking the M
you're not taking the mes data and the PLC and putting everything into a
unified namespace that where as I add new nodes and as I take nodes away they
just disappear from the namespace okay the namespace is
the digital twin of your entire business it is literally the visual
representation think of it as in a and a leaf node architecture in a folder
structure in a file share structure that's what it would be familiar that's
what it would look like the most people of your entire business in real time
imagining you could go to your corporate file share and I could click on a folder
that's called corporation and our enterprise and then I can click on a
folder for every plant I have and inside that folder I can click on another
folder for every single node I have for every piece of every application I have
and when I get down to the when I get down to the root of the or down to the
inside the folders I can see all of the real data inside those folders that's
what the unified namespace is right now you have a namespace here here here here
here here here and there and in every other application and you can't you
can't scale that into an IOT application until you normalize it and you got to do
that through a unified namespace so anyway that is the concept of the
unified namespace and iio T and it's a quick touch on why it is it ultimately
matters but what I can say is this or two there are two reasons you we have to
do this we all have to do this number one we can't scale enterprise
applications when we're doing explicit connections between software there's no
way it it literally isn't possible it takes two years to do the ERP two mes
the mes explicit connection for one plant how are you going to do that for
an entire business okay number one number two we can't get to the holy
grail until we have this okay