Smart Manufacturing Connectivity for Brown-field Sensors Testbed
Another finding by the Testbed team was the discovery that the amount of work put into developing a testbed is similar to that required when setting up an application for a governmentally funded research project. That is why it could make sense for IIC members to combine future research projects with testbeds. The practical aspect of a research endeavor could be implemented through a testbed, but it would largely depend from case-to-case whether such an approach would be practical or not.
To reduce the amount of work, proper planning in the testbed preparation phase is required. The schedule must be near exact and each testbed team member must understand each partner company’ s technologies. IT and OT people have different mindsets, terminologies and expectations towards other parties that are involved in a testbed. Good team preparation helps overcome typical struggles in the initial phase of a testbed to optimize collaboration.
By nature, the Testbed focuses on technical aspects. A usage scenario was defined and implemented for demonstration and validation purposes only. However, the Testbed’ s objectives and message could have been delivered even better through the inclusion of multiple business-relevant usage scenarios.
The intention is to roll the Testbed solution out to TE factories as an operations development project involving the Y- Gateway. This device is ready to be industrialized and prepared to sell. However, a demand for a considerable number of devices by TE’ s customers is required to define the final portfolio, variants, etc.
CONCLUSION
The Testbed provides a high volume of sensor data from brown-field manufacturing installations to enterprise IT systems in near real-time. The Testbed team attributes its remarkable success to good and early team preparation, respect across the OT / IT divide, valuable industry-leading participants, input from many IIC experts and IIC industry resources such as the IIRA, IICF and IISF. Their successes are influencing industry standards and Testbed participants are exploring paths to deployment and consumer demand in multiple real industry implementations. The significant impact this testbed is having and will continue to have on the manufacturing industry will be further detailed in an upcoming white paper summarizing the Testbed’ s findings and results, while future industry deployments will generate additional technical reports.
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