Forum discussion of developing standards at the pace of innovation

The Reinvention Laboratory, hosted by DKE, the German National Committee of the IEC, is a forum dedicated to presenting and discussing a wide range of ideas, visions and strategies on standardising digitalisation.

At the forum, Ulrich Wallenhorst, Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of TE’s Industrial business unit, and Monika Kuklok, Director of the Industrial business unit’s Internet of Things (IoT) team, participated in a session entitled “The Influence of Digitalisation in Standards.” They discussed the relevance of digitalisation for the industrial space and the role of standardisation to support digital processes. The presentation challenged IEC with developing standards at the pace of innovations. The discussion was moderated by Jonathan Graham, TE’s Industrial communications lead.

“The IEC needs to look at alternative ways to create standards,” said Wallenhorst, noting that the current system of drafting, review and discussions is too slow. “The standards are behind the technology and unable to take account of current innovations.” Wallenhorst suggested a hybrid look at standards in the future, with the IEC engaging with other associations and regulatory agencies to create de facto standards in important areas such as Industry 4.0, which is characterised by a continual stream of innovations.

TE also demonstrated its progress on creating a platform that provides sensor data to IT systems at the management level, showcasing TE`s collaboration with Pepperl + Fuchs and Software AG. This demonstration reflected the experimentation platform currently being developed with SAP, ifm and the OPC Foundation called the “Smart Manufacturing for Brownfield Sensors Testbed” by the Industrial Internet Consortium (IIC). TE made significant progress in the development of a retrofit hardware component that extracts sensor data from a real-time control system, avoiding any re-programming of the local control unit. The prototype of that “IoT OmniGate” was shown at the SPS IPC Drives in November 2016.

Another key aspect of the testbed is the conversion of IO-Link sensor data to OPC Unified Architecture. The progress made here will be fed into a respective standardization activity recently kicked off under TE’s lead.

Other key TE delegates and experts at the IEC GM included Günter Feldmeier, Dop Jooren, Koen Schepers, Christian Kröpfl and Vincent Pascucci, who participated in committee and individual working group meetings of sub-committee SC 48B on electrical connectors. “These groups made significant progress with the definition of the requirements for industrial connectors in general and for future IoT applications in particular,” says Günter Feldmeier, head of standardisation in TE Industrial: “The vision of the Industrial Internet of Things accelerates various demands at the same time such as high bandwidths, harsh environment, miniaturization and integrated functionalities. Those needs have to be covered in the next generation of standards and they have to be addressed quickly.”