If the Internet went down for two weeks,
could you still receive materials, make products, and ship orders?
A White Paper by Dr. Peter Green
Abstract
Manufacturing companies are increasingly dependent on Internet-connected systems for ERP, production tracking, inventory management,
reporting, and decision support. This creates a significant operational risk because extended Internet or data-center outages can disrupt
or halt production. This paper describes an alternative architecture in which critical operational functions are performed
locally at each manufacturing or distribution site using small IIoT computers, allowing operations to continue even when external connectivity
is unavailable.
For organizations with multiple locations, the paper describes a centralized Integrator and Integrated Operations
Management Database connected to site systems through secure store-and-forward communications.
Operational data and orders are retained locally during outages and automatically synchronized when communications are restored,
using acknowledgements, error checking, retransmission, and metadata-based validation to improve reliability over intermittent or error-prone networks.
Key Take-Away Points
- Design manufacturing operations to keep running without the Internet. Critical functions such as production tracking, traceability,
scheduling, materials planning, and decision support can be performed locally on an on-site
IOT computer rather than depending continuously on cloud services.
- Treat Internet connectivity as unreliable by design. Even redundant Internet connections can share common infrastructure and fail together, while outages can also originate in data centers, software updates, cyber attacks, weather, or other external events
- Use store-and-forward communications between locations. Data and orders should be retained locally during outages and transmitted
automatically when connectivity becomes available again.
- Require positive confirmation of successful data transfer. ACK/NAK responses, timeouts, validation, and retransmission help
prevent lost or corrupted operational data from being silently accepted.
- Combine local autonomy with centralized visibility. Multiple plants, warehouses, and field sites can continue operating independently
while periodically synchronizing with a central Integrated Operations Management Database when communications permit.
Please click here to download the PDF of
Reliably Capturing Operational Data Despite and Unreliable Internet Connection
