Year 2016
Anatoly Solovyev

Industrial internet and its role in process automation

Modern process automation undergoes a major shift in the way it addresses conventional challenges. Moreover, it is adapting to the newly arising challenges due to changing business scenarios. Nowadays, the areas of the automation that recently were rather separate start to merge and the border between them is fading.

This situation only adds struggle to the already highly competitive production industry. In order to be successful, companies should adopt new approaches to the way their processes are automated, controlled, and managed. One of these approaches is the so-called Industrial Internet. It is the next step after the traditional paradigm of the process automation pyramid that leads to the new vision of interconnected processes, services, machines and people.

However, general company does not usually eager to implement the new technology to its business. One of the reasons for this is that it does not see the advantages that the Industrial Internet brings. This is due to the lack of sufficient number of successful implementation examples in various industrial areas and of clear business scenarios for the use of the Industrial Internet.

Aim of the presented thesis is to create a convincing Industrial Internet application scenario. For the implementation, a mineral concentration plant was chosen as one of the industrial premises that possesses the shortage of the Industrial Internet examples.

Literature review section describes the process automation state of art. It lists and reviews the research and development initiatives related to the Industrial Internet. Moreover, the Industrial Internet fundamentals are given. Finally, it describes the Industrial Internet applications and the case studies.

In the practical part, at first, the description of the mineral concentration plant is given. Then, the next section describes the Industrial Internet application scenario. In the following section technical guidelines' for the system implementation are given. Also, in the concluding part of the thesis the future direction of research work are discussed.

Thesis electronical version can be downloaded from here

This info last modified 27 Apr 2024 by Jukka Kortela