Driving Industry 4.0 at Distributed Edges with Cloud Orchestration
• Scalability : Deployment and configuration of business applications are individualized according to customer-specific need and scenario as well as connectivity availability .
• High Availability : Capabilities of Kubernetes can be leveraged to create High Availability configurations for edge computing deployments . High availability configurations optimize response times and minimize downtime and are crucial in mission critical scenarios .
• Faster response times : Edge computing enables real-time decision-making capabilities within manufacturing processes to ensure business continuity and even if intermittent connectivity , limited bandwidth , and latency occurs .
• Robustness : Increased resilience to mission critical business processes since unforeseen last-minute changes can be handled locally and quickly .
• Low TCO : Lower TCO via simplified lifecycle management and orchestration of high complex topologies edge nodes from the cloud .
• Better customer experience : Optimal balance between standardized components and increased customer experience via simplified configuration of business application for specific scenarios .
• Plug and play : The consideration of industry standards within solutions for edge computing bring several benefits - plug and play via out of the box interoperability , increased acceptance of new technologies , and lower integration and operational costs .
Outlook
Although edge computing solutions provide key building blocks to enable mission critical execution of distributed processes across the supply chain , the edge computing technology still maturing , and several concepts can be explored in future works . The following points provide a preview of future developments in context of edge computing and Industry 4.0 :
• De-facto standards for highly distributed and heterogeneous edge computing landscapes : The establishment of de-facto standards to address the heterogeneous edge computing landscape will be decisive to avoid lock-in effects and node to node interoperability .
• Asset Administration Shell and edge computing : The question on how to leverage AAS in edge computing infrastructures to support digital twin across all phases of Design to Operate ( D2O ) will be addressed in future works . Also , the question on how edge computing and AAS could be explored to combine data from multiple sources and different systems ( IT and OT ) and to ensure the continuity of digital twins in highly distributed scenarios must be discussed . Since AAS would bring intelligence to assets , one argumentation to be evaluated is the convergence of the IoT assets layer into the Edge layer from the edgecloud continuum . Using the AAS , some business applications and data could be already consumed at the asset . Such approach must be discussed in future works since this will have an impact on the shop floor and other participants of the supply chain . Edge Computing as enabler of data sovereignty : Deeper discussions on how edge computing addresses data sovereignty requirements in context of Gaia-X and Catena-X are
- 36 - June 2021