As the IIoT is picking up speed in consumer and industrial markets, IIoT application development is becoming increasingly complex. Solution architects and enterprise developers are looking for tools that can abstract away the complexity and accelerate solution design and time to market.

Today we are launching an extensive comparative guide to rule-based automation technologies that can be used in the IIoT domain: A Comparative Guide To Rules Engines. The guide evaluates automation technologies against a set of criteria that we have identified as vital for IIoT applications, both from the point of view of the technology itself and from that of the implementation.

Although automation technologies may not be in the spotlight as much as the actual tools that different vendors build on them, it’s important to understand the limits of the technology so that you can assess whether that tool will ever fully meet your needs or not.

In other words, you may feel that you need a Node-RED or an ifttt, or a drools – type of tool, when actually neither flow processing engines (node-red) nor condition-action engines (ifttt) nor forward-chaining engines (drools) may be a good fit for your business case requirements. What’s more, the vast majority of real-life IIoT use cases usually require using more than one type of technology. When vendors are offering you integrated solutions or when you are looking at building your own stack with the best of breed, you should be able to easily and quickly identify the strong points of the underlying technology behind each tool or combination of tools and map out who plays nice with whom.

This guide will help you achieve this goal.

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Great article on IIoT automation & forward chaining engines

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