As the topic of my bachelor’s thesis at the TECO and part of the ScaleIT research project I’ve designed and developed an IoT software platform with focus on uniformity, openess and ease of adoption to tackle to problem of bringing flexible IT infrastructures to the industrial shopfloor.
Here’s my thesis’ abstract to get an idea of the topic.
Abstract
While recent trends towards highly digitized, smart factories entail substantial chances for manufacturing companies to boost their performance, flexibility and productivity, the industry commonly struggles to adopt suitable technology. One major problem is a lack of uniform, standardized solutions, which could be integrated to the shopfloor without the necessity of highly specialized technical expert knowledge and a large amount of planning and restructuring.\par
Addressing that problem, this work proposes an architecture design as well as a concrete implementation of a Internet Of Things software platform, which mainly focuses on technological uniformity and ease of adoption and usage. As a guideline, a real-world use case elaborated in cooperation with industry partners is presented. Further on, it is shown, how general purpose web technology can be combined advantageously with recent architectural-, operational- and cultural trends in software design, powerful machine-to-machine interaction techniques and common user experience concepts. In-depth thoughts on software structure, real-time communication, machine-to-machine interaction, uniform data integration and user experience are conducted to finally obtain a working proof-of-concept software alongside recommendations and best practices for adopting smart technology on the shopfloor. An eventual evaluation investigates the designed platform regarding both performance and suitability for particular real-world scenarios and recommends further endeavor to be conducted towards achieving an actual product.
Tech stack
We’ve used general-purpose web technology, Linked Data techniques, semantic hypermedia APIs with Hydra and state-of-the-art software development practices and cloud technology to fulfil our goal. We also picked up on the commonly understood UX concept of apps to abstract underlying technical details away from the end-user and created kind of an app store for on-shoploor purposes.
My work is published at the KITopen repository.
If you got curious and are interested in more details or in case you have questions or criticism, please feel free to contact me!