The Industrial Internet Consortium today announced a new testbed for next-generation factories: The Factory Automation Platform as a Service (FA PaaS) Testbed with IIC member organizations Hitachi, Mitsubishi Electric, and Intel Japan leading the testbed project. The goal of this testbed is to test open IoT platforms that seamlessly integrate factory automation (FA) in the front lines of manufacturing and information technologies (IT) that support management and operations.
“Manufacturing data is needed for improved productivity and overall optimization in the global supply chain to connect the front lines of manufacturing with management, suppliers, and customers,” said Dr. Richard Soley, Executive Director, IIC. “But there is also a need for secure connections between a variety of devices in the FA environment and IT services to accommodate big data and the cloud. The FA PaaS Testbed is designed to help accelerate the development of applications for next-generation factories, connecting business-to-business applications, and unleashing real economic value to help companies effectively compete in the global marketplace.”
The FA PaaS testbed includes an IoT data-processing platform, which processes big data, an IoT head-end system, and an IoT gateway, which securely connects the service platform layer with the FA environment. An FA edge device provides functions unique to FA applications and enables communications with FA devices in next-generation factories. An IoT platform provides integration and security between the FA environment and the service platform layer, enabling interoperability between the FA environment, IoT gateways and the IoT data-processing platform, accelerating application development for next-generation factories.
The FA PaaS Testbed will be verified for secure connections between FA environment and the service platform layer, the flow of operational data from manufacturing, and other functions by June 2017. Later, the FA PaaS Testbed will be verified with IIC member companies and customers.