Toward a Non-Invasive Architecture Supporting Traditional Textile Manufacturing Systems in Their Transition to Industry 4.0

Industry 4.0 (I4.0), considered the fourth industrial revolution, is now a well-established concept. However, certain manufacturing sectors, such as the textile industry, still face significant obstacles in adopting smart manufacturing and fully transitioning to I4.0. One of the main challenges for textile companies is the need to keep production data in-house. This requirement, essential for protecting industrial secrets, prevents companies from exporting production or design data to external cloud services. Despite these challenges, several factors will facilitate the transition of the textile sector to I4.0. Many textile companies already operate with legacy machinery capable of generating and transferring industrial production data. Additionally, most of these companies have on-premises servers, often preconfigured for data warehouse implementation. Another incentive will come from government funding, which will provide financial support to businesses embarking on the digital transformation journey. As part of a PhD research project, this paper presents some preliminary results of a research line focused on defining an architecture to support the traditional textile sector in its transition to comply with I4.0 criteria necessary for accessing government incentives. The proposed solution is intended to be non-invasive, as no IT intervention is required for the core business development of textile companies, in order to preserve the industrial design and avoid interfering with the normal workflow of textile operators.