Driving Industry 4.0 at Distributed Edges with Cloud Orchestration
is combined with business data from the cloud . Business applications running in this layer as well as its orchestration from the cloud are the focus of this paper and will be elaborated in the next subsections .
Cloud layer is the overlying computing infrastructure providing agile , flexible , on-demand access to business applications such as SAP Integrated Business Planning , Digital Manufacturing Cloud [ 16 ] [ 17 ], and Enterprise Resource Planning ( ERP ) systems . Cloud computing provides an affordable infrastructure for storing , managing , processing data in a centralized manner since its resources can be shared by multiple tenants . This layer is characterized ( see dimensions of Figure 2 ) by higher latency and network dependency . The value added to data grows across this dimension since cloud is the ultimate centralized source for business data in cloud / edge solutions .
Fig . 2 - Edge-cloud continuum for enabling mission critical execution of distributed manufacturing processes
Approach for mission critical execution of distributed manufacturing processes on the edge . As illustrated in Figure 2 , deployments of latency-sensitive and bandwidth-critical business applications are optimally placed in physical locations that promote the required continuity , robustness , and fast response times of business processes . The SAP Digital Manufacturing Cloud for edge computing approach [ 14 ] is an example of such deployment in the edge layer and is detailed below . As shown in Figure 3 , the approach consists , from an infrastructure view , of a cloud instance and one or more edge nodes that build the edge-cloud continuum as shown in Figure 2 . Plants represent both the edge layer as well as its underlying assets . Many manufacturing companies run
- 24 - June 2021