Introduction:

Industry 4.0 and the Industrial Internet of Things (IoT) has become one of the most talked about industrial business concepts in recent years. However, Industry 4.0 and the IoT are often presented at a high level by consultants who are presenting from a business perspective to executive clients, which means the underlying technical complexity is irrelevant. Consultants focus on business models and operational efficiency, which is very attractive, where financial gains and new business models are readily understandable to their clients. Unfortunately, these presentations often impress and invigorate executives, who see the business benefits but fail to reveal to the client the technical abstraction of the lower-layer complexity that underpin the Industrial Internet. In this book, we strive to address this failure and although we start with a high-level view of the potential gains of IoT business incentives and models, and describe successful use-cases, we move forward to understand the technical issues required to build an IoT network. The purpose is to provide business and technology participants with the information required in deploying and delivering an IoT network. Therefore, the structure of the book is that the initial chapters deal with new and innovative business models that arise from the IoT as these are hugely attractive to business executives. Subsequent chapters address the underpinning technology that makes IoT possible. As a result, we address the way we can build real-world IoT networks using a variety of technologies and protocols. However, technology and protocol convergence isn’t everything; sometimes we need a mediation service or platform to glue everything together. So for that reason we discuss in the middle chapters protocols, software patterns, and middleware IoT platforms and how they provide the glue or the looking glass that enables us to connect or visualize our IoT network. Finally, we move forward from generic IoT concepts and principle to Industry 4.0, which relates to industry, and there we see a focus on manufacturing. Industry 4.0 relates to industry in the context of manufacturing, so these chapters consider how we can transform industry and reindustrialize our nations.