LOOKING AT THE INTERSECTION OF AI AND IIOT

The Industry loT Consortium (IIC) recently announced a foundational document for Artificial Intelligence. This highlights the value proposition that Al can enable in next-generation Industrial IoT (IloT) systems. Wael William Diab, IIC Secretary, and VP, AI, IoT Standardization and Strategy, Futurewei Technologies Inc., tells us more about this.

- Pradeep Chakraborty

Elaborate on the Industrial IoT Artificial Intelligence Framework (ITAIF).

Rapid innovation in the field of AI has unlocked applications and services that are now fuelling the digital transformation across industry sectors such as manufacturing, transportation, healthcare, finance, and retail. To realize these transformational benefits, organizations must take takes a wholistic approach to the emerging requirements and challenges to accelerate the responsible adoption of next-generation AI-enabled IIoT systems.

The framework highlights the opportunities and benefits of incorporating AI. These include better insights, faster decision-making, and improved efficiencies. Unique considerations, such as business, technological, architectural, implementation, trustworthiness, ethical and societal, that stem from AI being deployed in IIoT ecosystems are presented.

How is the framework addressing the emerging requirements and implementation challenges?

The framework is unique as it takes a look at the intersection of AI and IIoT. Similar to IIC’s reference architecture (IIRA) and the industrial analytics framework (IIAF), the framework looks at a decision maker’s viewpoint from a variety of perspectives such as business and technical.

It also addresses many of the emerging considerations with AI, including trustworthiness and ethics, highlighting approaches and distinctions for IIoT applications. Finally, it looks at related emerging technologies and gives a summary of some of the international standards activities.