Social Internet of Industrial Things for Industrial and Manufacturing Assets*

The IoT (Internet of Things) concept is being widely discussed as the major approach towards the next industry revolution - Industry 4.0. As the value of data generated in social networks has been increasingly recognised, the integration of Social Media and the IoT is witnessed in areas such as product-design, traffic routing, etc. However, its potential in improving system-level performance in production plants has rarely been explored. This paper discusses the feasibility of improving system-level performance in industrial production plants by integrating social network into the IoT concept. We proposed the concept of SIoIT (Social Internet of Industrial Things) which enables the cooperation between assets by sharing status data and optimal operation and maintenance decision-making via analysis of these data. We also identified the building blocks of SIoIT and characteristics of one of its important components - Social Assets. Related existing work is studied and future work towards the actual implementation of SIoIT is then discussed.