Edge Intelligence for Industrial IoT: Opportunities and Limitations.

Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) nowadays represents a fundamental technology for the Industry 4.0 initiatives for connecting devices, operators and processes so as to eventually fuel digital transformation. However, if based exclusively on Cloud Computing, the IIoT faces inevitable limitations and barriers. Therefore, in this paper we deal with the Edge Intelligence (EI), a novel paradigm at the confluence of Edge Computing and artificial Intelligence, and, particularly, we analyze its impact on the processing of the IIoT data in the proximity of the events of interest rather than on Cloud servers. Therefore, a general discussion on the most relevant benefits, limitations and open challenges of the IIoT-EI duo is proposed hereinafter and exemplified through an emblematic IIoT use case: this is related to safety-critical tasks based on video analytics and provides a full-fledged comparison between Cloud-and EI-based IIoT deployments (in terms of reliability, responsiveness, bandwidth usage, energy footprint and usability), finally outlining a general strategy for large-scale EI-aided IIoT systems engineering. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]