IIC - Factory Automation Platform as a Service (FA-PAAS) Testbed

In recent years, amid increasingly intense global competition in the manufacturing industry, there has been a growing demand for more rapid product development and market introduction, quality improvements and shorter lead times in order to quickly respond to the rapidly changing market environments and management environments through the introduction of new technologies and collaborations between companies. In this backdrop, there has been a growing expectation for overall optimization that uses data related to manufacturing in the increasingly global supply chain to connect the front lines of manufacturing with management, suppliers, and customers. This in turn has given rise to a need for secure connections between a variety of devices in FA environment and cutting-edge IT services (e.g., Big Data and the cloud) and for the accelerated development of applications in the field of next-generation factories connecting business-to-business (B2B) applications unleashing real economic value to effectively compete in the global marketplace.

*This is an IIC testbed currently in progress.* LEAD MEMBERS Hitachi Ltd., Mitsubishi Electric Corporation, Intel Japan MARKET SEGMENT Manufacturing: Industrial Automation for Discrete Manufacturing SOLUTION As solution for these challenges, this Testbed provides connectivity between Factory and Cloud, data analytics platform, and security resources, in order to provide facilitation of FA application development for Application Providers and FA Equipment Vendors. With this result, Application Providers and FA Equipment Vendors will be able to provide solution and services to Factory Owners and Factory Operators by just developing core logic of each application. HOW IT WORKS This Testbed provides following features to reduce application development process: • Connectivity between Factory and Cloud where architectures differ • API specialized in FA, which are re-usable for FA applications: Edge Applications, Cloud Applications, and Domain Applications • Security to protect the Factory brown field from the outside network • Integrate data from Business Systems TESTBED INTRODUCTION This testbed facilitates development of FA applications by providing a service-based platform with pre-integrated environment across factory automation (OT) and IT platform (IT). It includes IoT data processing platform that processes Big Data, IoT head end system, and IoT gateway that securely connects the service platform layer with FA environment, and FA edge device that provides functions unique to FA applications, and which also enable communications with FA devices in the field of factories. In addition, the advantage of IoT platform tested in this testbed is interoperability between FA environment, IoT gateways and IoT data processing platform and accelerates application development for next-generation factory by making available of integrated environment between FA environment and service platform layer. Tests of secure connections will be completed between FA environment and service platform layer, as well as tests of the effectiveness of testbed functions and the flow of operational data from the perspective of the front lines of manufacturing, by June 2017. After that, it will conduct “use case” tests with IIC member companies and customers.

• [Efficiency Improvement - R&D]
  Facilitate development of high value-added applications for manufacturing industry
• [Data Management - Data Integration]
  For FA equipment vendors: Facilitate integration of value-added applications, such as remote operations and predictive maintenance
• [Efficiency Improvement - Productivity]
  For Factory owners and operators: • Facilitate deployment of applications as to improve productivity, quality, and factory-operation uptime; and reduce lead time of production. • Facilitate deployment of applications as to optimize value chain and supply chain by coordinating between manufacturing and other departments such as procurement, distribution, and sales.