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SCENARIO FOR A DIGITAL PLATFORM EVALUATION

USE CASE

A manufacturer employee uses a laser cutter machinery to carry out its functions. In order to embrace the digital transformation it would like to start collecting data to build application that will be able to:

  1. Report on the daily, weekly and monthly activities
  2. Collect information on activity in order to start apply predictive maintenance
  3. Collect information in order to apply AI to reduce waste material and improve material handling
    4. Use case

The manufacturer could follow two different approaches, an Informatization and business intelligence one and a digital manufacturing platform one.

Informatization and business intelligence approach

In this approach the manufacturer will try to build applications to reach the goals. For each application he will try to collect the information from the MES system which is already integrated with the PLC that is in charge of driving the cutting machine. Moreover for each application it will be necessary to build some batch in order to collect the information from the MES database and send those information to the destination application. Each destination application will handle the batch to collect the data. Each application:

  • handle its own security
  • have its own kind of monitoring and troubleshooting
  • try to constantly increase the frequency of the batch in order to produce more up to dated data
  • need to manage its hosting system (OS)

The MES system will complain of the load produced by these new external extractions and each time it need to deploy a new version a test session has to be coordinated among all applications.

Digital Platform approach

In the digital platform scenario the PLC communicates with an edge Gateway that will produce standard messages for the cutter machinery operations. The new application only need to subscribe to these messages without impacting any other applications. In this way the application will receive real time messages.
The digital platform

  • will provide security services for the application, infact it does not need to understand how to authenticate users or profile them
  • will host and monitor the application so this one does not need to provide these features just integrate correctly with the platform

In this case adding, removing, modifying an application will not impact any other.