Kafka for Condition Monitoring and Predictive Maintenance in Industrial IoT

The manufacturing industry is moving away from just selling machinery, devices, and other hardware. Software and services increase revenue and margins. A former cost center becomes a profit center for innovation. Equipment-as-a-Service (EaaS) even outsources the maintenance to the vendor. This paradigm shift is only possible with reliable and scalable real-time data processing leveraging an event streaming platform such as Apache Kafka. 

This post explores how the next generation of software for Condition Monitoring and Predictive Maintenance can help build new innovative products and improve the OEE for customers.

Apache Kafka for Industrial IoT and Manufacturing 4.0

This post explores use cases and architectures for processing data in motion with Apache Kafka in Industrial IoT (IIoT) across verticals such as automotive, energy, steel manufacturing, oil&gas, cybersecurity, shipping, logistics. Use cases include predictive maintenance, quality assurance, track and track, real-time locating system (RTLS), asset tracking, customer 360, and more. Examples include BMW, Bosch, Baader, Intel, Porsche, and Devon.

Why Kafka Is a Key Piece of the Evolution for Industrial IoT and Manufacturing

Industrial IoT was a mess of monolithic and proprietary technologies in the last decades. Modbus, Siemens S7, SCADA, and similar "concepts" controlled the industry. Vendors locked in enterprises by intentionally building incompatible products without open interfaces. These systems still run on Windows XP or similar non-supported outdated operating systems and without security in mind.

IoT Architectures for Digital Twin With Apache Kafka

A digital twin is a virtual representation of something else. This can be a physical thing, process or service. This post covers the benefits and IoT architectures of a Digital Twin in various industries and its relation to Apache Kafka, IoT frameworks and Machine Learning. Kafka is often used as a central event streaming platform to build a scalable and reliable digital twin and digital thread for real-time streaming sensor data.

I already blogged about this topic recently in detail: Apache Kafka as Digital Twin for Open, Scalable, Reliable Industrial IoT (IIoT). Hence that post covers the relation to Event Streaming and why people choose Apache Kafka to build an open, scalable and reliable digital twin infrastructure.