Edge expands from a collection of hardware to realize its platform potential

What you’ll learn:

While manufacturing edge is critical to any automation strategy, making the most of the edge means looking at it from a different perspective.
The modern edge is not just a buzzword, but rather an architecture born of new technologies—many of which originated in the cloud.
The evolving edge environment is a building block for a complete redefinition of the industrial edge.

Process manufacturing organizations around the globe are experiencing a paradigm shift in the way they deploy and manage their automation systems.

As the number of technologies has exploded in the last decade, and as data and compute power-intensive tech like AI and cloud analytics have emerged as critical enablers of operational optimization and autonomy, organizations have looked closely at their automation systems and begun to reconsider the architectures supporting them.

A key part of this exploration has been an increasing focus on edge technologies. Operations personnel are looking carefully at the systems closest to their sensors and trying to find ways to connect and make the best use of those technologies in their overall automation strategy.

However, while it is true that the manufacturing edge is a critical element of any automation strategy, making the most of the edge means looking at it from a different perspective.

The edge is more than simply a collection of hardware and computing power close to where the work is happening in a plant.

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The modern edge is not just a buzzword, but rather an architecture born of new technologies—many of which originated in the cloud—that can manage, provision, and connect all the computer capacity installed on-prem as part of an enterprise operations platform. Under such a definition, the edge becomes an area of untapped potential that will fundamentally redefine automation in the coming years.

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Traditional edge is siloed

The traditional definition of edge technologies typically considers a wide array of self-contained automation systems, including the distributed control system (DCS), reliability systems, various programmable logic controllers (PLCs), and more.

While each system is internally integrated, the independent systems are isolated. They have their own environments, configuration, and more, and all are maintained differently, through different interfaces, and in many cases by different people.

For example, consider a modern, best-in-class DCS. The DCS is a collection of many different nodes. Some are built into embedded hardware, and others are servers and workstations. The DCS recognizes, understands, and monitors all those different nodes.

Via the DCS’s single, cohesive interface, teams can configure nodes, update firmware, install and uninstall software, apply patches, roll out upgrades, and more. Because the interface is unified, a change at the top level rolls out to the entire DCS infrastructure. Users do not need to visit each node independently to implement changes.

This configuration is more efficient than implementing several disconnected controllers, all of which would have to be managed independently, and it saves significant time and engineering effort to implement and maintain.

However, while the DCS has a centralized admin layer for all its nodes, that admin layer is proprietary and is not designed to manage the edge nodes outside the DCS. But a plant’s edge is constantly growing with nodes outside and beyond the DCS that it needs to manage—additional PLCs, reliability equipment, compressor controls, and more.

Typically, those solutions are themselves integrated, or custom engineered in a way that allows them to send data to the DCS, but maintenance and management of these systems isn’t integrated. If the team wants to see hardware diagnostics, change firmware, or update a configuration, they must perform those tasks using a variety of different tools.

When all the compute power across the edge is disassociated in this manner, teams are not fully leveraging edge technologies, and many of the most elusive performance gains are unachievable.

A tool for a modern edge

One of the key technologies enabling integration between the DCS and other edge nodes and the cloud today is the modern edge environment. Fit-for-purpose edge environments provide secure data egress from the automation systems to other edge and cloud systems, such as data lakes, AI engines, enterprise analytics tools, enterprise resource planning systems, and more.

The most advanced solutions can not only move data seamlessly but also retain the data’s context as well as provide a containerized environment where users can run applications for visualization, analytics, alarm management, digital twin simulations and other needs, all using that contextualized data.

Because modern edge environments unlock data trapped in individual nodes across the OT domain, they have become a critical element of many organizations’ boundless automation strategy for data mobility. However, modern edge environment solutions are poised to play a much more significant role in the future of OT as the foundational element for a seamlessly integrated industrial operations platform.

Building a new way forward

The evolving edge environment is a building block for a complete redefinition of the industrial edge. Though today the edge environment is primarily focused on moving data to the DCS and the wider IT infrastructure, the most advanced edge environments will introduce a wide array of new technologies, many originally born in the cloud.

This type of environment will allow different devices—controllers, servers, hosts, and more—to benefit from new technologies like containerization, Kubernetes, fleet management, centralized provisioning, and operating systems with embedded security.

Leveraging these new technologies, edge nodes will be managed, provisioned, and connected as part of a seamless platform. All devices will coexist and naturally integrate, allowing management from a central point of view, regardless of the domain from which each node originates.

These edge-driven, seamless automation platforms will do more than just drive innovation and help teams make better business decisions, as they will also support the software-defined architectures that will provide more flexibility and capacity to existing automation solutions.

That shift, in turn, will be the foundational element of a step-change in automation, where a next-generation automation environment driven by the edge and a seamless data fabric enables the deployment of advanced AI technologies—unlocking the capabilities that will be critical to achieving optimized autonomous operations.

Embracing the future of edge

The evolution of the edge is still a work in progress. However, the foundational elements are available today and can already deliver massive improvements in enterprise visibility and flexibility, while also paving the path for implementation of the secure enterprise operations platform that will unlock next-generation autonomous operations.

It all starts with understanding that the edge, while still a collection of compute technologies physically deployed on-prem, is evolving to deliver an end-to-end integrated software defined automation environment.