Five Tenets of Reliable Operations
Michael Chu
Product Management | Product Marketing | Product Development | Program Management | Process Improvement
Like many of my friends and colleagues, I love technology!
Being an engineer by passion and training, I enjoy learning about the latest and "shiniest" technologies, sometimes simply to "geek out". However, having also been a product manager for over half of my career, I know that my customers have real and important business needs that they want to solve. For modern industrial customers, what really matters is getting their operation line up quickly, having it always be running and making sure it never unexpectedly goes down. Basically, they want reliable operations.
New technical developments and innovations are being talked about and introduced on a regular basis. This can make it hard for industrial leaders to know what to pay attention to if they want up-to-date and reliable operations.
I want to go over five tenets that I believe every industrial customer should care about in their pursuit of reliable operations:
Simple and Secure Onboarding of New Devices - FIDO Device Onboard (FDO)
You need to bring up your operations in the shortest amount of time and be able install replacement devices easier and faster. The first step to achieving this is onboarding your devices. Onboarding is the process of installing and setting up a device so that it is connected, configured and ready to go.
I recently read a blog post from one of my colleagues where he gave a stark comparison of how different setting up consumer electronics is vs. most Internet of Things (IoT) devices. Setting up a new printer was as simple as unboxing it, plugging it in and waiting for the driver to update and install automatically.
Contrast this to onboarding industrial IoT devices which often requires a technician to manually run through a process for each device. This can be slow, expensive and often not secure. Sometimes, the cost of onboarding can exceed the cost of the device itself. Why can't it be easier?
It is not to say that companies have not tried to automate the process, but what happens if you are trying to onboard a new device into an environment with devices from different manufacturers?
This is where FIDO Device Onboard (FDO) comes in. In the summer of 2019, the FIDO Alliance, along with key cloud service providers, semiconductor and security companies, formed the IoT Technical Working Group. Their goal was to define a new standard for automated, secure IoT onboarding.
To learn more about FDO, start with this whitepaper published by the working group.
Scalability and Faster Failover - Virtualization and Workload Consolidation
Traditionally, industrial operations have multiple isolated programmable logic controllers (PLCs), human-machine interfaces (HMIs), industrial PCs (IPCs) and other devices. This can result in higher maintenance costs, increased complexity and difficulty scaling capacity to accommodate future growth needs.
By virtualizing and consolidating the workloads running in your industrial operation, you may be able to lower your costs and make your operations easier to manage and more easily recovered. Virtualization creates isolated environments, called virtual machines (VMs), that access the underlying hardware through a layer called a hypervisor. Each of these VMs runs as it if it were the only environment on that hardware. VMs cannot interfere with each other.
Multiple VMs can be consolidated onto a single server, reducing the number of physical devices you need to maintain. If you need more performance, you can even upgrade the underlying hardware without changes to your virtualized workload. You can also replicate the virtualized workload onto other hardware to handle additional workload needs.
If hardware fails, simply take the virtualized environment and start it up on spare hardware in a shorter amount of time.
A great place to start to learn about workload consolidation in industrial IoT is this whitepaper .
Open, Modern and Interoperable Communications - Time-Sensitive Networking (TSN)
As industrial operations increasingly incorporate IoT devices and IPCs, proprietary network interfaces are being replaced with standard network interfaces, such as Ethernet. Ethernet offers the convenience of integrating well with normal IT networks while providing a way for industrial devices from different manufacturers to communicate.
One of the characteristics of Ethernet is that it is a best-effort delivery network. It offers no guarantees that a packet actually made it to its destination nor does it promise any level of quality of service. This is okay for normal IT networks since a properly designed network provides an acceptable level of service, most of the time. In the worst case, the networking layer will just retry after a certain amount of time.
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However, if Ethernet is being used to receive sensor data and send control signals to equipment and robotics, a best-effort delivery network could ruin an industrial operation or even cause damage and injury. Manufacturers have, in the past, addressed this with proprietary interfaces, but this prevents interoperability between equipment from different manufacturers. What we need is a way to add determinism to standard Ethernet. Deterministic networking is able to guarantee that a message is transmitted and is done so in a predictable amount of time.
Time-Sensitive Networking (TSN) was created to solve this exact problem. TSN is a set of standards that is being developed by the Time-Sensitive Networking Task Group of the IEEE 802.1 Working Group . The goal behind this set of standards is to provide guaranteed packet transport with bounded latency, low variation in latency and low packet loss over standard Ethernet.
If you have read my previous article, "OPINION: You Really SHOULD Consider Using Wireless for Your Industrial Edge!" , you will remember that similar standards have been created for Wi-Fi and 5G.
To learn more about TSN, watch this overview video .
Safe Automation - IEC 61508
Once your operations are up and running, you want to make sure that all of your equipment performs as intended so that your property and employees stay safe. However, we know that things happen and failures will occur. The most important thing is to make sure that you minimize the chance of failures from happening, and when they do occur, they fail in as predictable and safe way as possible.
Modern industrial operations are complex and we need a tested and reliable way to ensure that our operations meet our safety requirements. When it comes to industrial electronics-based systems, the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) has published IEC 61508 for this very purpose.
Being an engineer, what struck me as different about IEC 61508 was that it is not a prescriptive standard, but rather describes the process and methodology by which you design, deploy and maintain safety-related systems. In contrast, a prescriptive standard would tell you the exact requirements of how you build the system and its individual components.
With IEC 61508, first of all, you have to have an industrial process which has a certain amount of risk that you need to reduce. You would determine how much you need to reduce your risk by and choose a Safety Integrity Level (SIL) that would provide the order of magnitude of risk reduction you need. You would then choose components that meet or exceed the SIL level you needed.
However, simply using components capable of a certain SIL level is not enough. IEC 61508 requires you to further analyze the design, interactions and procedures to ensure the entire function you are trying to perform is safe.
Other than IEC 61508, there are other related standards, such as IEC 61511. IEC 61508 is primarily targeted at the vendors and suppliers of the equipment you will use, while IEC 61511 sets out best practices for safety in manufacturing processes. However, it is still a good idea for industrial customers to be aware of IEC 61508 and so they know if the equipment they purchase meets their safety needs.
I found this video as well as this recorded webinar to be very helpful in my understanding of IEC 61508 and related industrial safety topics.
Secure Systems - IEC 62443
Finally, as you incorporate more IT and other technologies into your industrial process, you need to make sure that no one can hack into your factory nor can a rogue application bring down your production line. Thankfully, there are standards that have been created to help you assess how secure your industrial automation and control systems (IACS) are and help you improve them to the level that you need for your business.
Published by the IEC, the same group that published IEC 61508 for functional safety that we talked about earlier, IEC 62443 is a series of standards defining the requirements and processes for implementing and maintaining electronically secure IACS. It provides best practices and ways to assess security performance.
Similar to IEC 61508, IEC 62443 describes the processes for securing your IACS and does not talk about specific technologies. Its purpose is to help you gain confidence that your solution is as secure as you need it to be. Roles and policies for each are defined. With IEC 62443, you and your suppliers have a common frame of reference to use to target a security level and evaluate the security of the entire system.
A great place to get started learning about IEC 62443 is this whitepaper .
Reliable Modern Industrial Operations, An Achievable Goal
As you can see, even as you incorporate modern technologies to increase the output and profitability of your industrial business, maintaining or improving the reliability of your operations is definitively an achievable goal. I have highlighted the top tenets you should care about in that pursuit in this article.
What challenges have you encountered in your pursuit of reliable industrial operations?
Share your thoughts and experiences.