As the business manager of a machine builder, I want to offer value added annualized services to my
customers. In the long term, this will be leasing machines on a usage basis, but the next step my users are prepared to take is outsourcing maintenance. In order to deliver these services, I am prepared to invest significantly in additional instrumentation from multiple vendors and software in the machines that I deliver. I want to be able to create parts of the information model in controllers that is only available for me to access – I consider this information to be mine and not my customers and not for use by other service providers. In order to simplify access, I want to be able to deploy a single gateway function (either in a standalone compute appliance or embedded in the controller I select) which will provide connectivity to my own historical cloud storage. I want this gateway to be able to securely deliver my proprietary information together with standardized and vendor specific information from the components, together with application specific information in controllers and information from discrete devices in the machines.

For the machine builder, supporting the native protocol required at a plant is critical to their business – essentially the same machine will be delivered using both CIP and third-party protocols to the different plants – it is only in hybrid plants that the machine builder may have any autonomy.

However, like the data scientist the machine builder will have a strong preference for a single cloud-friendly protocol to deliver consistent information from all of the plants.

This story brings a new requirement which is around role-based security – that the provision of information to the cloud is controlled by the machine builder and not by the user of that machine.

Further delivery requires input from the plant network engineer who will be responsible for appropriate creation of firewall rules. The fewer technologies deployed, the less work and more importantly, the less risk created.