November 2015
28
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Platform-based design
for the Industrial Internet of Things
By Andy Chang,
National Instruments
It will take a platform-based approach
to achieve a fully connected world.
The platform-based design concept
stems from a formal modeling
technique, clearly defined abstraction
levels and the separation of
concerns to promote an
effective design process.
The IoT has the potential to impact our lives
profoundly. Customers of National Instru-
ments play a critical role in inventing, deploy-
ing and refining the consumer and industrial
products and systems at the center of the IoT,
as well as the wired and wireless infrastruc-
ture connecting those products and systems
together. Spanning well over a decade, the NI
and Xilinx technology partnership has pro-
vided engineers and scientists with tools to
create world-changing innovations. NI has
delivered latest generations of Xilinx devices
in successive generations of its most advanced
products, ranging from NI FlexRIO modules
to CompactRIO controllers, as well as NI Sys-
tem on Module (SOM) and myRIO devices.
NI takes great pride in its role helping innova-
tors to design, build and test these intelligent
devices with integrated software and hard-
ware platforms.
According to Gartner Inc., an estimated 4.9
billion connected devices will be used in
2015, rising to 25 billion in 2020. These con-
nected systems range from smart factory
machines and advanced driver assistance sys-
tems (ADAS) in automobiles, to energy grids
in smart cities and wellness wearables that
help people live longer, healthier lives. The
Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) can be
characterized as a vast number of connected
industrial systems that are communicating
with one another and coordinating their data
analytics and actions to improve industrial
performance and benefit society as a whole.
Industrial systems interfacing the digital
world to the physical world through sensors
and actuators that solve complex control prob-
lems are commonly known as cyber-physical
systems. These systems are being combined
with Big Analog Data solutions to gain deeper
insight through data and analytics. Imagine
industrial systems that can adjust to their
own environments or even their own health.
Instead of running to failure, machines sched-
ule their own maintenance or, better yet,
adjust their control algorithms dynamically to
compensate for a worn part, and then com-
municate that data to other machines and the
people who rely on those machines.
As such, the landscape of the IoT can be fur-
ther segmented into three parts: the intelligent
edge (sensor/actuator), the system of systems
and end-to-end analytics that support all the
connectivity and data analytics while meeting
requirements of latency, synchronization and
reliability. More often than not, different ven-
dors produce these intelligent products, which
have various embedded processors, protocols
and software. The integration of these prod-
ucts throughout their design cycles to the final
deployment is a key challenge. It will take a
platform-based approach to achieve a fully
connected world. The platform-based design
concept stems from a formal modeling tech-
nique, clearly defined abstraction levels and
the separation of concerns to promote an
effective design process. All of these factors
are critical in designing and building IoT sys-
tems. The idea is to provide engineers with the
right level of abstraction while also providing
connectivity to other elements and subsys-
tems that may be in a different software lan-
guage or framework, and different hardware
protocol. For the last four decades, NI has
provided powerful, flexible technology solu-
tions that help engineers and scientists accel-
erate productivity, innovation and discovery.
NI invests greatly in providing an integrated
hardware and software platform to help its
broad spectrum of customers - from health-
care and automotive to consumer electronics
and particle physics - overcome complexity.
Specifically, the NI LabVIEW reconfigu-
rable I/O (RIO) architecture takes advantage
of the openness of both LabVIEW software
and commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) hard-
ware to provide a common architecture for
designing and building IoT systems. Recently,
LabVIEW RIO incorporated the Xilinx
Zynq-7000 All Programmable SoC platform.
The result will be to continue to drive open-
ness and scalability through the introduction
