MIINT: Middleware for IIoT Platforms Integration

In the last recent years Internet of Things has extended its adoption to the industrial manufacturing field. The digitalization of industry brings the new concept of Industry 4.0 to light. In fact, the enormous value for the companies generated from the adoption of Industrial IoT and Edge Computing has led to a vertiginous increments of IIoT platform demands. Therefore, world-wide big IT players and Foundations start to introduce their own flagship IIoT platforms into market. This multitude of platforms presents similar common features, but with different APIs. These platforms are hardly interoperable, and they are frequently bounded to their own vertical solution stack. To overcome these limitations, in this paper, we propose MIINT, a Middleware for IIoT platforms INTegration. MIINT groups the common functionalities of IIoT frameworks, and it integrates different platforms by providing standard access APIs. To prove the feasibility of MIINT, in this paper, we show an integration use case of Azure IoT and EdgeX Foundry IIoT platforms. Moreover, we also thoroughly assess MIINT by executing on the edge a field data reading functionality in the two considered IIoT platforms, by showing their advantages and limitations.