Industrial Automation Component Contextualizing Relationship Data
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Solution Overview
Problem
Industrial automation systems lack effective methods to recognize and communicate the attributes and relationships between components, leading to inefficiencies in operation and energy management within the system.
Innovation Solution
An industrial automation component that can contextualize data from other components within the system, recognize relationships, and store this information for improved operational control, using a network to broadcast data and adjust operations accordingly, enabling efficient energy use and production optimization.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Loss of information
If industrial automation components operate independently without contextual awareness, then device complexity is reduced, but loss of information about system relationships and attributes increases
Solution Approach 1:
The patent introduces a cloud platform as an intermediary that collects, stores, and manages component relationship data. Individual components broadcast their attributes to the cloud platform, which then contextualizes this information and makes it available to other components. This mediator approach allows components to gain system-wide awareness without each component needing complex local processing capabilities.
Solution Approach 2:
The patent adds a new dimensional layer to the traditional automation architecture by introducing cloud-based data layers. Instead of components directly communicating in a flat network topology, the system creates hierarchical dimensions with components at the device level and contextualized relationship data at the cloud level, allowing components to access system-wide information without direct peer-to-peer complexity.
2Loss of information
If components broadcast and share all system data, then awareness of system attributes improves, but use of energy for communication and processing increases
Solution Approach 1:
The patent implements selective data broadcasting where components transmit only their essential attributes and identification information to the cloud platform, rather than continuously sharing all operational data. The cloud platform then contextualizes this partial information set, providing components with system-wide awareness while minimizing communication overhead and energy consumption compared to full data exchange.
3Productivity
If components autonomously control operations based on contextualized data, then productivity increases, but device complexity increases
Solution Approach 1:
The patent enables components to autonomously adjust their operations by retrieving contextualized relationship data from the cloud platform and making self-directed control decisions. Components query the cloud for system state information and automatically optimize their operations based on this contextualized data, achieving improved productivity without requiring complex centralized control logic at each device.
Data Source
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AI summary
An industrial automation component that may receive data associated with at least one other industrial automation component in an industrial automation system. The industrial automation component may contextualize the data with respect to the industrial automation system and recognize a relationship between the industrial automation component and the at least one other industrial automation component based on the contextualized data. The industrial automation component may then store the relationship between the industrial automation component and the at least one other industrial automation component in a memory.