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In this article by Jojo Moolayil, author of the book Smarter Decisions – The Intersection of Internet of Things and Decision Science, you will learn that the Internet of Things (IoT) and Decision Science have been among the hottest topics in the industry for a while now. You would have heard about IoT and wanted to learn more about it, but unfortunately you would have come across multiple names and definitions over the Internet with hazy differences between them. Also, Decision Science has grown from a nascent domain to become one of the fastest and most widespread horizontal in the industry in the recent years. With the ever-increasing volume, variety, and veracity of data, decision science has become more and more valuable for the industry. Using data to uncover latent patterns and insights to solve business problems has made it easier for businesses to take actions with better impact and accuracy.

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Data is the new oil for the industry, and with the boom of IoT, we are in a world where more and more devices are getting connected to the Internet with sensors capturing more and more vital granular dimensions details that had never been touched earlier. The IoT is a game changer with a plethora of devices connected to each other; the industry is eagerly attempting to untap the huge potential that it can deliver. The true value and impact of IoT is delivered with the help of Decision Science. IoT has inherently generated an ocean of data where you can swim to gather insights and take smarter decisions with the intersection of Decision Science and IoT. In this book, you will learn about IoT and Decision Science in detail by solving real-life IoT business problems using a structured approach.

In this article, we will begin by understanding the fundamental basics of IoT and Decision Science problem solving. You will learn the following concepts:

  • Understanding IoT and demystifying Machine to Machine (M2M), IoT, Internet of Everything (IoE), and Industrial IoT (IIoT)
  • Digging deeper into the logical stack of IoT Studying the problem life cycle
  • Exploring the problem landscape The art of problem solving
  • The problem solving framework

It is highly recommended that you explore this article in depth. It focuses on the basics and concepts required to build problems and use cases.

Understanding the IoT

To get started with the IoT, lets first try to understand it using the easiest constructs. Internet and Things; we have two simple words here that help us understand the entire concept. So what is the Internet? It is basically a network of computing devices. Similarly, what is a Thing? It could be any real-life entity featuring Internet connectivity. So now, what do we decipher from IoT? It is a network of connected Things that can transmit and receive data from other things once connected to the network. This is how we describe the Internet of Things in a nutshell.

Now, let’s take a glance at the definition. IoT can be defined as the ever-growing network of Things (entities) that feature Internet connectivity and the communication that occurs between them and other Internet-enabled devices and systems. The Things in IoT are enabled with sensors that capture vital information from the device during its operations, and the device features Internet connectivity that helps it transfer and communicate to other devices and the network. Today, when we discuss about IoT, there are so many other similar terms that come into the picture, such as Industrial Internet, M2M, IoE, and a few more, and we find it difficult to understand the differences between them. Before we begin delineating the differences between these hazy terms and understand how IoT evolved in the industry, lets first take a simple real-life scenario to understand how exactly IoT looks like.

IoT in a real-life scenario

Let’s take a simple example to understand how IoT works. Consider a scenario where you are a father in a family with a working mother and 10-year old son studying in school. You and your wife work in different offices. Your house is equipped with quite a few smart devices, say, a smart microwave, smart refrigerator, and smart TV. You are currently in office and you get notified on your smartphone that your son, Josh, has reached home from school. (He used his personal smart key to open the door.) You then use your smartphone to turn on the microwave at home to heat the sandwiches kept in it. Your son gets notified on the smart home controller that you have hot sandwiches ready for him. He quickly finishes them and starts preparing for a math test at school and you resume your work.

After a while, you get notified again that your wife has also reached home (She also uses a similar smart key.) and you suddenly realize that you need to reach home to help your son with his math test. You again use your smartphone and change the air conditioner settings for three people and set the refrigerator to defrost using the app. In another 15 minutes, you are home and the air conditioning temperature is well set for three people. You then grab a can of juice from the refrigerator and discuss some math problems with your son on the couch. Intuitive, isnt it?

How did it his happen and how did you access and control everything right from your phone? Well, this is how IoT works! Devices can talk to each other and also take actions based on the signals received:

The IoT scenario

Lets take a closer look at the same scenario. You are sitting in office and you could access the air conditioner, microwave, refrigerator, and home controller through your smartphone. Yes, the devices feature Internet connectivity and once connected to the network, they can send and receive data from other devices and take actions based on signals. A simple protocol helps these devices understand and send data and signals to a plethora of heterogeneous devices connected to the network. We will get into the details of the protocol and how these devices talk to each other soon. However, before that, we will get into some details of how this technology started and why we have so many different names today for IoT.

Demystifying M2M, IoT, IIoT, and IoE

So now that we have a general understanding about what is IoT, lets try to understand how it all started. A few questions that we will try to understand are: Is IoT very new in the market?, When did this start?, How did this start?, Whats the difference between M2M, IoT, IoE, and all those different names?, and so on. If we try to understand the fundamentals of IoT, that is, machines or devices connected to each other in a network, which isn’t something really new and radically challenging, then what is this buzz all about?

The buzz about machines talking to each other started long before most of us thought of it, and back then it was called Machine to Machine Data. In early 1950, a lot of machinery deployed for aerospace and military operations required automated communication and remote access for service and maintenance. Telemetry was where it all started. It is a process in which a highly automated communication was established from which data is collected by making measurements at remote or inaccessible geographical areas and then sent to a receiver through a cellular or wired network where it was monitored for further actions. To understand this better, lets take an example of a manned space shuttle sent for space exploration. A huge number of sensors are installed in such a space shuttle to monitor the physical condition of astronauts, the environment, and also the condition of the space shuttle. The data collected through these sensors is then sent back to the substation located on Earth, where a team would use this data to analyze and take further actions. During the same time, industrial revolution peaked and a huge number of machines were deployed in various industries. Some of these industries where failures could be catastrophic also saw the rise in machine-to-machine communication and remote monitoring:

Telemetry

Thus, machine-to-machine data a.k.a. M2M was born and mainly through telemetry. Unfortunately, it didnt scale to the extent that it was supposed to and this was largely because of the time it was developed in. Back then, cellular connectivity was not widespread and affordable, and installing sensors and developing the infrastructure to gather data from them was a very expensive deal. Therefore, only a small chunk of business and military use cases leveraged this.

As time passed, a lot of changes happened. The Internet was born and flourished exponentially. The number of devices that got connected to the Internet was colossal. Computing power, storage capacities, and communication and technology infrastructure scaled massively. Additionally, the need to connect devices to other devices evolved, and the cost of setting up infrastructure for this became very affordable and agile. Thus came the IoT. The major difference between M2M and IoT initially was that the latter used the Internet (IPV4/6) as the medium whereas the former used cellular or wired connection for communication. However, this was mainly because of the time they evolved in. Today, heavy engineering industries have machinery deployed that communicate over the IPV4/6 network and is called Industrial IoT or sometimes M2M. The difference between the two is bare minimum and there are enough cases where both are used interchangeably. Therefore, even though M2M was actually the ancestor of IoT, today both are pretty much the same.

M2M or IIoT are nowadays aggressively used to market IoT disruptions in the industrial sector.

IoE or Internet of Everything was a term that surfaced on the media and Internet very recently. The term was coined by Cisco with a very intuitive definition. It emphasizes Humans as one dimension in the ecosystem. It is a more organized way of defining IoT. The IoE has logically broken down the IoT ecosystem into smaller components and simplified the ecosystem in an innovative way that was very much essential. IoE divides its ecosystem into four logical units as follows:

  • People
  • Processes
  • Data
  • Devices

Built on the foundation of IoT, IoE is defined as The networked connection of People, Data, Processes, and Things. Overall, all these different terms in the IoT fraternity have more similarities than differences and, at the core, they are the same, that is, devices connecting to each other over a network. The names are then stylized to give a more intrinsic connotation of the business they refer to, such as Industrial IoT and Machine to Machine for (B2B) heavy engineering, manufacturing and energy verticals, Consumer IoT for the B2C industries, and so on.

Summary

In this article we learnt how to start with the IoT. It is basically a network of computing devices. Similarly, what is a Thing? It could be any real-life entity featuring Internet connectivity. So now, what do we decipher from IoT? It is a network of connected Things that can transmit and receive data from other things once connected to the network. This is how we describe the Internet of Things in a nutshell.

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