The term Industrial Internet term is already not new. The primary idea being there are industrial devices that are on local network sending data to a controller - that's also on the internet. The challenge is to bring this data accessible and make sense of it. Hence the manufacturing industry has huge potential where many devices connected to the internet.
Additional reading material with a detailed study is can be found here.
To take an example as per the paper there is a 1% savings possible for Oil and
gas industry. What does it really mean?
We can apply techniques such as web
applications to the devices on internet (not just mobile devices but anything
that can capture data) and provide its analytics as a web applications. – Think
home appliance connected to your home wifi or work network.
Many apps are on the app store similar for
IOS and other platforms. Some of the use cases are data
collection, device management, automation, control, analytics, predictive
behaviors, as a computing power in the form of distributed information network. Many standards are already in place such as NMS and OPC that can enabled standardized access.
The analytics enables solutions for improving productivity. Details would depend on the actual device and what data is made available.
Further it is possible to provide private/public cloud with these
devices connected to the internet for select set of users. These applications can enable to
optimize and provide analytics and visualization for decision making. In nut
shell each connected device in the industrial internet can support users
from internet. The support could be reduced overhead, report ability, and grid
computing capabilities. The more data collected and made available from these
devices can make suggestions for further improvement in design and recommend
trials. By adding these devices remote control is also possible.
There are benefits if these devices are online e.g. energy efficiency for a longer period of time. The target platform can also enable the unified vision that many strive for.