The best way to explain the I-IoT data flow of industrial signals, from their generation at field level in the factory, to when they are processed in the cloud, is to start from the controllers. They perform the following steps cyclically and sequentially:
- Read the measurements that arrive as input from the sensors
- Execute the control algorithms that are fed by the last reading of the inputs
- Write the outcomes of the control algorithms as outputs to the actuators
This cycle is the same for all kinds of controllers (embedded controllers, PLCs, or DCSes, for example) but a cycle's duration varies according to the kind of controllers in use:
- Embedded controllers take a few milliseconds
- PLCs take between ...
