In the Industrial Internet Age, the internet has gone from being a tool for quick access to information to a majority foundation of new technologies. The proof of this is the technologies inherent to the fourth industrial revolution, such as the Internet of Things ( Internet of Things – IoT ). In this sense, the era of industrial automation, marked by the computerization of mechanized and repetitive processes, gives way to a new era: the era of the industrial internet, marked by technologies that fuse information systems with control and industrial automation systems.
It is a fact that the era of automation allowed the industry to not only grow in productivity, but to establish a fundamental concept: the valorization of time. More than gold, it was realized that time is worth lives, because, with the rapid pulse of production on the factory floor, relevant changes in society emerged, such as the emergence of new technical specializations, the diversification of products to the final consumer and the encouraging a culture of safety at work.
Age Of Industrial Internet
In the age of the industrial internet, automation is driven by the internet, breaking the management limits of the factory’s local control systems for the connection between local and other data available in the cloud. This connection has revolutionary impacts on the company-customer relationship, such as: product customization in a fast and dynamic way; focus on the end user in their individuality and inventory management. In fact, the impacts of the digital transformation that the industrial internet affects are better dimensioned when the concepts of IoT and Industrial IoT ( Industrial Internet of Things – IIoT ) are understood .
The basic concept of IoT is the connection between millions of smart devices to each other. These smart devices read data from the environment where they are installed, transmit and process such data over the internet and provide responses based on this processing. Essentially, it is a communication between machine and user (machine-to-use). IoT applications include: smart cities, pollution monitoring and smart transport.