FROM THE EDGE TO THE ENTERPRISE: Are you prepared to manage hundreds of Edge devices without spending all your time, or that of your team?
What is understood as Edge? We detail all the characteristics that a device must meet to be considered “Edge”
The term Edge is increasingly present in the world of automation. But, what is understood as Edge? There are several opinions and visions. From my point of view, the Edge is still what we have always known as “at the machine level” or “at the plant level”, but with an IoT component that we will address later. I pose an initial reflection: is a PLC or a PAC an Edge device? If we stick to its functionalities, everything should point to yes: capable of locally controlling the process and serving data from the process upstream. However, in practice, a PLC is not considered an Edge device in many areas. So…
What Characteristics Must a Device Meet to be Considered “Edge”?
First of all, an Edge device should not, under any circumstances, attempt to replace the function of the PLC. That’s what PLCs are for, to control the process! Let them continue to do their job. Instead, we should see Edge devices as the key Gateway piece between distributed field elements and the SCADA of the unified control center, or in some cases, the platforms in the cloud directly.
Therefore, Edge devices fulfill a series of functionalities that make them essential in IoT architectures:
- They implement logic capacity and decision-making (never to replace a PLC, but to be at a directly higher level).
- They have the capacity to be installed in embedded devices (with Windows IoT operating systems or Linux distributions).
- They have a high capacity for interoperability, being able to communicate downstream with typical industrial protocols, and upstream with typical IoT protocols such as MQTT, HTTP-REST, or OPCUA.
- They offer web access graphical interfaces to be able to act as a Local HMI.
Only one last key functionality remains that definitively differentiates standard field devices from Edge devices: massive administration.
Using Docker container technology, these devices are capable of acquiring a complete image of the software, its dependencies, and the project to be executed from the cloud automatically and autonomously, allowing hundreds of devices to massively load a project. Without displacements and without having to interact directly with them. That is, the Edge device itself checks if there are changes in the image that it should use, and if so, it is capable of downloading it safely and automatically, installing it, and starting to function in runtime.
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