Atomiton: Digital Service Grid for Industrial IoT

In a typical industrial environment such as a processing plant, a drilling rig, or a refinery, administrators usually have a very narrow time window for making accurate decisions. However, a typical IT solution deployed into these environments usually collects data, stores in databases, prepares the data, and then retrospectively applies models to analyze the data. The traditional IT approach, therefore, doesn’t meet the industrial IoT needs. On the other hand, technologies such as programmable logical controllers (PLCs) and the SCADA system lack the ability to integrate multifaceted data with existing systems or process complex modules for analytics. These devices don’t adapt to real-time variations in the industrial environments or business operations such as changing market prices. Because of these constraints, IoT solutions seldom deliver intended business outcomes. “This impedance mismatch between the physical and the virtual is what we are trying eliminate through our Atomiton Stack,” says Jane Ren, CEO of Atomiton. Atomiton Stack—also termed Digital Services Grid—provides the digital industrial services to bring intelligence to traditionally fixed controls. “Our digital service grid has been field-proven in many deployment scenarios involving smart cities, oil and gas, precision agriculture. On this grid, we not only digitalize industrial machines but the industrial processes as well,” says Jane.

In today’s heterogeneous industrial environments, most companies continue to operate with the same machines and equipment. This calls for software that has two inter-dependent functions. The software has to adapt to the different protocols in the industrial and enterprise space—ranging from low level sensors like I²C to digital sensors and PLC connections to high level IP-based connections like MQTT and HTTP. The other function is to mitigate the complexity in configuration while switching between protocols and vendors without affecting the structuring and processing of the data.

Jane substantiates that they have worked directly with PLCs, SCADA, ERPs, and integrated new sensors.Going beyond communications, there are three key aspects that the company brings to the table: digitization, optimization, and orchestration. Through digitization, the aim is to understand the relationship between the disparate data for intelligent analysis.