Today, several pilot plants exist in the field of modular automation, which are constructed based on various Process Equipment Assembly modules (PEAs). With an increase in pilot plant facilities and later also production facilities within different companies, a system managing this increasing number of PEAs will be needed. Hence such a system should be usable company wide as well as for different vendors of Process Orchestration Layers (POLs). This article is presenting a suitable concept for such a system as well as parts of a first demonstrator for it.

Traditionally, industrial and IoT data analytics applications run in the cloud, leveraging its power regarding big data processing capabilities. With edge computing, opportunities for moving data processing from the cloud to the edge has emerged, i.e., compute nodes become close to where data is generated and to where the processed results are consumed. When running analytics on the edge, lag time is minimal, such that real-time data can be considered and insights can be delivered faster, which leads to improving both the effectiveness and efficiency in online decision-making. From a software architecture perspective, it is still a challenge to design systems for edge analytics as it raises many architecture-related questions. However, this architectural perspective on edge analytics has not been consolidated in literature so far. Therefore, in this paper, we first give an overview of the edge analytics topic from the perspective of our own experience from industrial projects, before we survey a subset of existing approaches for edge analytics and review them from a software architecture point of view. We investigate the differences among the surveyed architectures in order to shed some light on the covered architectural aspects of edge analytics architectures, which will be useful for future academic and industrial projects incorporating edge analytics.

There is growing interest in building and operating industrial plants from standardized modules described by MTP’s (Module Type Package). But this new approach brings with it its own set of new challenges. While in the traditional approach of building an industrial plant, one would deal with individual sensors and actuators, this new approach requires, amongst other things, the management of large pools of modules in the engineering and operation phases of a plant. In this contribution, we analyze these new requirements and report on our approach on building a demonstrator to deal with these new issues.