Control from the Cloud: Edge Computing, Services and Digital Shadow for Automation Technologies

Due to agile product development, production systems have to be flexible and adaptable to meet high quality standards and a high productivity. As a result, set-up processes has to be shorter and more resilient because of the increasing number of variants. To meet future requirements, the processes need to be self-adaptive and reconfigurable at any time. Nowadays, a shift of the automation pyramid to interconnected cyber physical systems can be observed as well as emerging technologies as cloud and edge computing are introduced to production systems. These technologies in combination with the Digital Shadow, which provides information about all production assets, open up potential for an adaptive process control and an overall life cycle data management. For this, the Digital Shadow has to be used not only for the aggregation of data, but also for pushing data back into the system and to control the process. As a result, services in regard to an architecture based on edge computing as an enabling technology for an adaptive production together with the Digital Shadow are presented, implemented and discussed on the basis of an industrial use case.