IIC Testbed Demonstrates IoT-Enabled Smart Manufacturing on Legacy PLC Equipment

Industrial Internet Consortium (IIC) members have unveiled a breakthrough that lets plant operators retrofit decades‑old manufacturing facilities with IoT capabilities, all while keeping legacy programmable logic controllers (PLCs) running at full speed.

Dr. Michael Hilgner, manager of Consortia and Standards at TE Connectivity—a Swiss leader in sensors and connectivity for harsh environments—explains that most PLCs in “brown‑field” sites are outdated and can’t absorb extra workload. “We replace the PLC’s existing I/O module with a retrofittable module that creates two independent data streams—one for the PLC’s original task and another for analytics,” Hilgner says.

By tapping into the real‑time controller system at the first aggregation level, rather than at the PLC itself, the solution avoids overloading the control hardware. This is especially critical in brown‑field environments where the PLC is dedicated solely to automation.

Key technical highlights:

• Retrofittable hardware from TE Connectivity works with SAP and other partners.
• IO‑Link sensors feed data through a Y‑Gateway that splits traffic: one path feeds the PLC, the other routes to the cloud or an IoT platform.
• Data sent via OPC Unified Architecture (OPC UA) over TCP/IP guarantees interoperability and security.
• Mapping from IO‑Link to OPC UA is fully standardized, enabling seamless integration with existing systems.

The findings are detailed in the white paper Smart Manufacturing Connectivity for Brown‑Field Sensors Testbed, which also shows how the technology can be paired with SAP’s Manufacturing Integration & Intelligence suite to drive overall equipment effectiveness (OEE).

In two pilot studies, IO‑Link sensors measured air‑flow consumption, temperature, and part count. The resulting data on compressed‑air usage per part was sent to either SAP Manufacturing Integration & Intelligence or the SAP Cloud platform, where operators could view dashboards revealing significant variations in air consumption across production runs—a previously hidden insight that opens the door to root‑cause analysis.

Early industry feedback has been overwhelmingly positive. “When we presented the concept to IIC members, we received immediate interest from numerous companies,” Hilgner notes. The team is now preparing to deploy a full‑scale prototype in a real‑world manufacturing environment as it moves toward commercialization.

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