A key industry that is driving the Internet of Things is Manufacturing. Companies are always looking to make their manufacturing process more efficient, flexible and improve quality, while lowering costs. Therefore, modernizing factory floors and integrating factory equipment with the enterprise IT systems is of interest to many manufacturing companies. In Germany, they call this trend Industrie 4.0. They see IoT as being the fourth industrial revolution to fundamentally change the manufacturing industry. For history buffs, the other industrial revolutions are considered to be: mechanization with water and steam, mass production, and robotic automation.
The Eclipse IoT community has been developing open source technology that can be used to implement Industry 4.0 solutions. A key strength of our community is that we have companies like Bosch, Red Hat, Eurotech, Sierra Wireless, IBM and others, who are experts in operational technology (OT) and experts in enterprise IT technology (IT). It is really the integration of OT and IT that leads to successful Industry 4.0 deployments.
To help educate organizations on how open source software can be used to implement Industry 4.0 solutions, the Eclipse IoT Working Group has announced two new initiative:
- A new white paper titled ‘Open Source for Industry 4.0‘ has been published. This white paper describes the software features required for Industry 4.0 and what open source projects are available.
- A new Eclipse Open IoT Testbed has been launched to showcase how Eclipse IoT technology and commercial solutions can be used to implement Production Performance Management (PPM) for factory floors. The PPM Testbed is a collaboration of Bosch SI, Contact Software, InfluxData, Eurotech and fortis GmbH. It is a great example of how open source software can be used to solve important challenges in the manufacturing industry.
Both these initiatives are great examples of collaborations made possible by the Eclipse IoT Working Group. It also shows how open source is really ready to solve Industry 4.0 challenges.
Next week we will be talking a lot about the PPM testbed, Industry 4.0 and All Things IoT. I hope you will join us.