Deployment of Local Automation Clouds

Deployment of a new system is an expensive, labor-intensive process. Once installed, maintaining, monitoring and extending the system are equally labor-intensive and generally require site visits from qualified technical staff. Arrowhead Eclipse solutions aim to make the onboarding of new devices and remote diagnostics as simple and efficient as possible while taking system security into account.

Four important challenges that the Eclipse Arrowhead project addresses are:

• a shift from design time to runtime engineering,
• a move from single to integrated multi-stakeholder automation/digitalisation
• handling a dramatically increasing number of inputs/outputs 
• making digital learning and training activities an integral part of the engineering cycle

A shift from design time to runtime engineering is not only more cost efficient, it also enables a system to be reconfigured and adapted dynamically. Multi-stakeholder integration allows users to add necessary functionality, for example adding a device to the system through an onboarding application, while the management of the system is dealt with separately. As automation becomes more finely grained it is important that new systems are able to be scaled on demand, meaning that they should be able to accomodate the addition of new nodes and gateways. With so much information now available it is also important insights generated are naturally incorporated into the engineering cycle.  

In this presentation from the Eclipse Arrowhead Youtube channel, Marek Tatara of DAC introduces a use case in the deployment and configuration of local clouds. He explains the engineering process and how the case is approaching the challenges described above. The presentation introduces an onboarding tool chain consisting of four application systems: an IoT node, an onboarding application, cloud management infrastructure and a field gateway. 

Watch the full presentation here