Mitsubishi Electric has addressed the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) need for business to harvest production data from shop floor to cloud computing with its Edge Computing solution. The solutions are built on local control platforms to provide filtering and pre-processing of production data from intelligent devices, and at the same time facilitate communications to a broad range of standard and niche cloud services. One of the challenges of the IIOT is managing the vast amount of data that is becoming available, and using this to provide reliable information to enable people or machines to make decision. With an estimated five billion devices already connected to the IIot, traditional IT infrastructure is already becoming stressed, and this is only the beginning. Edge ComputingThe data needs to be captured, aggregated, simplified and processed, and then delivered to machines, processes and business systems to enable production decisions to be made in real time. This is the essence of Edge Computing, which pushes the intelligence, processing power and communications capabilities of an edge gateway or smart device directly into local and powerful programmable automation controllers (PACs). Businesses are increasingly using these cloud services not simply to store large volumes of data, but also to perform analytics on that data, deriving trend information and presenting users with customised dashboards with which they can improve overall plant performance and asset management. Complementing Cloud ComputingEdge Computing is complementary to Cloud Computing, and businesses are increasingly finding that they need the capabilities of both. The cloud delivers the 'bigger picture' of the Industrial Internet of Things, while Edge Computing brings the Industrial Internet of Things to life by supporting applications that demand a real-time response. Mitsubishi Electric has developed solutions that support both of these complementary IIoT approaches, with simple and secure access to a range of different cloud services while at the same time facilitating Edge Computing. These solutions are built on technologies such as Mitsubishi Electric's C-Controller, MES interface and MAPS SCADA platform. Providing an effective Edge Computing platform, the Mitsubishi Electric C-Controller is an open platform controller that can execute C language type programs. Capabilities include the ability to embed database technology from Mitsubishi Electric e-F@ctory Alliance partners directly into Mitsubishi Electric PACs, improving overall transparency and performance of critical production operations. INDUSTRY-WIDE SUPPORTBecause Edge Computing and Cloud Computing are complementary, the Mitsubishi Electric solutions also facilitate seamless transfer of information into different cloud services. There is support for the best-known and biggest cloud services - including SAP Hana, Microsoft Azure and Amazon - but also for special cloud solutions, niche cloud applications and dedicated cloud-based analytics services. Cloud computing has already become an indispensable tool for companies who are seeing their IT infrastructure stressed by the need to process burgeoning volumes of data, and to access that data on a wide variety of devices, both locally and remotely. At the same time, requirements for Edge Computing are growing fast, speeding up the dissemination of pre-processed data to applications that require a low latency response. With its Edge Computing platforms and cloud connection services, Mitsubishi Electric is at the forefront of developing solutions to address these vital modern business requirements. See full Edge Computing press release from Mitsubishi Electric
