IIC Journal of Innovation 17th Edition Applying Solutions at the Digital Edge | Page 30

Driving Industry 4.0 at Distributed Edges with Cloud Orchestration
enables OT / IT convergence , as the edge node with its deployed business applications is capable of ingesting raw data directly from the assets ( OT data ) and combining it locally with business context ( IT data ) made available from the cloud .
From a usage and business scenario perspective , this approach supports manufacturing supervisors and operators on the plant or shop floor with the ability to make faster decisions on manufacturing . For that , non-mission critical applications run in the cloud and non-mission critical data is stored in the cloud . If these functionalities and data are business-critical as well as latencysensitive , they are additionally replicated to the corresponding edge nodes using local proxy / cache mechanisms . Mission critical applications can then run at the edge and latency-sensitive data are buffered on the edge for rapid retrieval .
Depending on the scenario and hardware constraints ( e . g ., footprint ), these applications and / or this data are deployed on the corresponding edge nodes in a distributed manner . Edge nodes have then the capability to buffer , pre-process , and filter data before uploading it to , or downloading it from the cloud . It can optimize the data synchronization with cloud according to the current bandwidth , latency , and connection availability while also keeping connection costs down . It also ensures that any maintenance , update , or upgrade of the IT infrastructure does not affect the continuity of processes .
Relevant business applications for mission critical applications at the edge . After analyzing the manufacturing environment and the identification of the mission critical processes , it is necessary to define which business applications must run on the edge nodes . Digital Manufacturing Cloud ( DMC ) [ 16 ] is deployed in the cloud ( Figure 3 , top ), while solutions for edge computing ( DMC for edge computing [ 14 ] and Edge Services [ 19 ]) are deployed on the edge nodes ( Figure 3 , bottom ).
Business applications in the cloud focus on functionalities such as resource orchestration and management , design of production processes , manufacturing execution , manufacturing networks , monitoring , and analytics . It also provides a central control plane for edge lifecycle management and orchestration of business applications , business data , and the corresponding business configuration for the underlying edge nodes .
Other examples of applications that are typically deployed in the cloud are manufacturing insights or training of AI / ML models for manufacturing inspection from a large amount of data that has been sent from the plant . Business applications deployed on the edge are order management , manufacturing execution , dispatching , and monitoring , resource orchestration , dashboards , machine integration and automation , alerts , and execution of ML models .
In addition to the business applications on the edge , synchronization services for business objects and data ensure that edge applications run independently of cloud connection . These services enable bi-directional movement of business data to provide eventual consistency between edge and cloud data sources . To provide optimal consistency , this service buffers data on either side
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