Why Does MQTT Matter for Manufacturing?

Jun 2

An operator standing in front of a furnace control panel on a frigid Chicago January day grabbed the first work order from the stack that he needed to run during his shift. He pulled up the data entry screen to start the furnace and began typing in the work order number.

Because he needed to use a touch screen keyboard, he mistyped a couple of characters and had to go through the painful process of re-entering the them (along with all the rest of the data for that batch, nearly an entire page) before beginning to enter another handful of pages of data for the rest of the batches on deck.

Luckily, the higher ups knew there had to be a better way and partnered with Corso Systems to roll out an Ignition SCADA system across the facility.

What the operator didn’t know was that all the data he was manually entering for every single batch came from the company’s ERP system. Old manufacturing technology that was incapable of integrating with the ERP system was the one thing standing in the way of him being able to throw the stack of paper work orders in the trash.

By using Ignition to directly pull the data out of the ERP system, it was now possible to enter the entire page of data into the furnace’s control system with just a work order number. It would also set the relevant recipe in the furnace for any particular batch, and save the operator from struggling through multiple pages of data entry per shift. Instead of a stack of papers, he only had to get the work order number from a tag tied to the baskets containing each batch of parts that he needed to run. Now, instead of painstakingly completing multiple pages of data entry per shift, he only had to enter between 25 and 50 characters (depending on the number of batches he needed to run).

A great side benefit to the time saved by eliminating all that typing was that the operator could now run two additional batches through each furnace per shift as compared to the previous workflow.

Industrial Marketing Made Easy

If you’ve been following manufacturing technology developments in the last decade, you have likely heard the terms Digital Transformation, IT/OT Convergence, and Industry 4.0.

Effectively, these terms refer to the same idea: integrating Operational Technology (OT) systems with Information Technology (IT) systems. OT refers to the equipment used in your manufacturing process, PLCs, sensors, instruments, pumps, valves, conveyor belts, etc. IT refers to all of the various systems you use to run your business including databases, ERP systems, customer service and CRM systems, work order management, and shipping/receiving to name a few. Stories like the opening of this post are a great example of how relatively simple integrations like pulling data from a database can have a huge impact on a company’s operational capability.

The idea is by integrating the OT systems with your IT systems you can better understand how your factory is operating. This integration can help by correlating business inputs like work orders and production schedules with what is running on the plant floor at any given time. You can leverage these integrations to understand how production slow downs affect delivery times, or how conditions on the plant floor can affect quality, and determine the overall output of your process.

MQTT can be an important component of the technology stack for safely integrating OT and IT systems. At the most basic level, MQTT is simply a way to get data from one device to another with a focus on specific manufacturing data.

MQTT Basics

For a detailed walkthrough of MQTT, be sure to read our popular post, MQTT Simplified.

In a nutshell, MQTT can package up individual data points with Vanilla MQTT and map the data points to topics that defining the data is in a user friendly way. An example of a topic for a tank level is below, defining the facility, production area, production location, specific device, and the value we are sending.

Lynchburg Distillery/Fermentation/Floor 1/Tank 1/Level

The data is sent to an MQTT Broker, basically a hub for all of the MQTT data in your system. This lets other users and devices connect to the broker to send/receive data from a wide variety of sources without having to connect to them directly.

You can also package up other types of data with MQTT: files, images, and just about anything you want! A really fun example that uses MQTT is a demo we did for the Ignition Community Conference with Corso Systems Partner Opto 22! We integrated a booth cam we later used to generate a timelapse video of the event. The camera sent images up to an MQTT Broker in an Ignition Cloud server, stored them in a database, and then gave people a QR code they could scan to retrieve their booth selfies on demand!

Beyond Vanilla MQTT, the Sparkplug B framework can package up a lot of time series data from a device and send it in a compressed format that uses less network bandwidth than tradition communication protocols. While this framework is specific to time series data, it is a powerful tool in the overall industrial communication toolbox.

By using an MQTT Broker to manage all of the data, you can connect many devices by passing data back and forth in the Broker. This strategy also has a lot of cybersecurity advantages which we will discuss below.

MQTT Within the Factory Walls

Connecting distributed sites like pump stations with a cellular data connection and which need to use as little data as possible is a very common MQTT use case.

In a manufacturing facility where all of your data typically stays “within” the four walls of your plant, this use case is less helpful. In most instances, companies will use the protocols that are built into their PLCs and SCADA systems to communicate data back and forth. If you only need to build out screens for your operators to control your plant, then this is a completely valid approach and adding MQTT to the mix probably won’t make much sense.

But, using MQTT does make sense for your plant if you plan to build out a Unified Namespace for your company. A Unified Namespace, or UNS is a tool you can use to generate a snapshot of any (or all) areas of your business. MQTT is a very powerful tool in this scenario, because you can get data from your PLCs with names that make sense to plant floor staff, and pass it to an MQTT Broker using a topic structure that makes sense to your teams on the business side. Now, they can see real-time plant information in a format that will be the most useful for them. While you could build a UNS without MQTT, using MQTT lets you easily map data into the right format for whoever needs to look at it.

Cloud-Based Data Management Systems

With the ever-increasing prevalence of AI and Machine Learning tools, MQTT has become one of the most widely adopted ways to get data from your equipment into these systems. Common platforms like Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure support (and oftentimes prefer or require) sending your data to their systems using MQTT.

Using MQTT to pass data to these systems helps standardize the data format, and the built-in topic structure of MQTT makes it easy for these platforms to parse the data for running their analytics engines that give you actionable insights.

Tools like the Cirrus Link MQTT Modules for Ignition simplify this process by automatically packaging the data in the right format. Data warehousing, AI, and analytics tools like Snowflake and Databricks also support MQTT as a first class method of receiving data. Cirrus Link also has modules for Snowflake to simplify the process of getting data into that platform.

If you aren’t already using MQTT in your process of moving to cloud-based data management systems, now is a great time to start.

MQTT and Cybersecurity

For a more detailed discussion of MQTT’s inherent cybersecurity features right out of the box, please read our Defense in Depth post on the topic.

Each device connected to your network increases your overall risk for a cybersecurity incident or attack. This includes PLCs connected to your SCADA system, and even connecting your OT and IT infrastructure despite all of the benefits of those integrations.

Fortunately, using an MQTT Broker helps immensely with cybersecurity by reducing the number of network connections required to connect all of your devices.

The main reason for these benefits is that your network architecture can be set up to keep all inbound ports to your MQTT enabled devices closed, and to limit the number of ports open between the devices and your MQTT Broker. This massively reduces the ways that a bad actor can bypass your network security. You can also install SSL Certificates to encrypt your data and provide as secure as possible connections between your devices and your broker.

Beyond the network security aspect, you can use usernames and passwords and Access Control Lists on your broker to limit who has access to the broker in the first place, as well as what data is available. This approach can be extremely useful if you are working with OEM vendors to add new equipment to your facility. You can give them access only to the data they need from the MQTT Broker without sharing critical process data they don’t need access to in the first place.

Wrapping Up

MQTT can be a very powerful tool in your manufacturing technology arsenal. While it was originally designed for large physically distributed systems for Oil and Gas companies, this powerful protocol has since been widely adopted across more traditional manufacturing operations. It’s easy to see why, given the huge cybersecurity benefits and ease of integration with cloud-based tools for AI and data analytics services.

The Ignition SCADA platform has incorporated MQTT into their offering for almost a decade, and we have seen it grow across the entire manufacturing spectrum as companies seek out more robust, secure solutions capable of taking them into the future as their businesses and information requirements grow.