IndustryFusion: The democratization of Industry 4.0
Channel: The ASF
Date: 2020-10-15

IndustryFusion: The democratization of Industry 4.0
Konstantin Kernschmidt, Matt Mikulina, Marcel Wagner

A presentation from ApacheCon @Home 2020
https://apachecon.com/acah2020/

Small and mediumsized machine manufacturers (SMEs) currently are undergoing a tremendous transformation process. For decades high quality machines were the main development focus and precision on the scale of a human hair made the engineers' hearts beat faster. However, growing global competition, changed customer requirements and the wish to extend innovation leadership require that additional data-driven services are offered to the cutsomers in addition to selling the machines. Implementing an IIoT-solution for their machines confronts the companies with two major challenges: 1. SMEs do not have the ressources to „experiment“ with proprietary IIoT-solutions, pushing them into an undesirable vendor lock-in. 2. The solution has to be interoperable with the solutions from other manufacturers, as usually up to 100 different machines are present in a factory and the customers only want to have one transparent Smart Factory and not 100 different digital solutions. In order to achieve an IIoT-solution that fits these needs of SMEs, a growing group of innovative machine manufacturers teamed up with IT- and Open-Source experts to implement IndustryFusion, a cross-manufacturer interoperable open source solution for Industry 4.0. IndustryFusion is an Apache 2.0 licensed, fully deployable End-2-End IIoT-solution covering all required layers - i.e. perception, network, middleware, application - for implementing a digital ecosystem. The architecture intergrates several Apache projects(PLC4X, Kafka, Cassandra, Beam, Flink) and can either run entirley on premises, using StarlingX, or be deployed in any cloud environment.

Konstantin Kernschmidt:
Konstantin Kernschmidt is passionate about the digital transformation of small and medium-sized enterprises. He has a broad experience in mechanical engineering, IT and smart factory solutions. Konstantin is head of Research & Development / Industry 4.0 at MicroStep Europa GmbH and the technical lead of IndustryFusion. Prior to his current position, he was general manager of a cross-disciplinary research center focusing on innovation processes and new business models in the context of Industry 4.0. He holds a PhD in automation and information systems as well as a diploma in mechanical engineering and management from the Technical University of Munich (TUM).

Matt Mikulina:
At MicroStep Europa - a manufacturer of high-end CNC cutting systems - he accompanied the digital transformation of key business processes. In his new role within the IndustryFusion Team, besides the brand communication, he passionately takes care of the user experience & application design, streamlining processes and building a scalable solution.
Marcel Wagner:
Marcel Wagner is Software Application Engineer in Intel's IoT Group. In this role, he works with cusomters on Open Source Edge-Cloud platforms and Cloud Native architectures, with focus on Industrial IoT. He contributed to open source projects like StarlingX, the OpenStack open source Edge-Cloud, and Open IoT Service Platform, an open source cloud platform which is based on Apache projects like Kafka, Beam, Flink, and Casssandra. Before joining Intel, Marcel was researching at Siemens Corporate Technology and Nokia Networks on video transmission protocols and distributes applications. Marcel holds a Dr. rer. nat from the University of Freiburg, Germany, and a master of science (Dipl. Inform.) from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology.