This is a technical position paper stating Porritt Inc.'s engineering view. It is not a peer-reviewed publication and does not report experimental results. Where it forecasts capability, it is stating design intent rather than achieved performance.
Bandwidth is the tax
Streaming every tag continuously consumes network, storage, and historian capacity, most of it spent recording that nothing happened.
Decide at the transmitter
When classification costs milliwatts it belongs at the measurement point. The control system receives events with context instead of an undifferentiated sample stream.
Coverage becomes affordable
At years-on-battery power budgets, instrumentation can be placed where conduit was never going to reach. Coverage becomes an economic decision, not a civil-works project.
Trust and verification
Distributed decision-making raises a real question: how do you verify a decision made at the edge? We do not consider this solved.
Configuration management across thousands of decision-making endpoints, firmware integrity assurance, and audit of edge decisions are unresolved. In safety-instrumented applications, an edge-resident decision would require a certification pathway that does not yet exist.
Discuss the research.
We welcome technical challenge on these positions. Collaboration enquiries welcome.
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