The Industrial Internet Consortium (IIC) announced the publication of the Industrial Internet Connectivity Framework (IICF), a reference architecture for IIoT system and solution architects to evaluate connectivity technologies as they design IIoT solutions.
According to the IIC, IICF was developed to unlock data in isolated systems, enabling interoperability between previously closed components and subsystems.
The IICF maps out IIoT connectivity and provides a treatment of connectivity as a means of building interoperable IIoT systems. It clarifies the layers of the IIoT connectivity stack and defines the minimum expectations of an IIoT connectivity framework as being able to achieve syntactic interoperability between IIoT components and subsystems. The IICF provides an assessment template as a tool for evaluating connectivity technology and placing it correctly on the IIoT connectivity stack. It defines a connectivity reference architecture to enable horizontal interoperability and establishes the criteria for core connectivity standards.
