- Introduction A quite big company that produces parts for some of the most important automotive industry companies was interested in a cloud-based system to monitor the overall efficiency of their production machines, analyze some key parameters and optimize the production activities scheduling.
Goal of the project was to connect eleven industrial manufacturing machines to the cloud, extract specific machine data and develop a web application for the visualization and management of such data, while guaranteeing information confidentiality and security.
Furthermore, one fundamental requirement of such system has been the bidirectional integration with the customer’s ERP system, in order to synchronize the production JOBs and manage their execution on the corresponding machines.
To fulfill such requirements, the project team has engineered and then implemented an hybrid edge-cloud solution in which the software has been packed into various containers that are orchestrated and managed, at the edge level, by a Kubernetes cluster.
This technology ensures an optimal load balancing between the available resources as well as a high availability in case of hardware or software failures.
While IT enterprises do not question the value of containerized applications anymore, the use of such kind of technologies within a manufacturing environment hasn’t been completely explored yet.
In the following paragraphs we will go into details on how we engineered and built the system despite all the difficulties we had to overcome.
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