From the Shop Floor to Cloud-Based Cyber-Physical Systems: The RAMP Case Study
摘要
RAMP.eu, the Robotics and Automation Marketplace, aims to facilitate the matchmaking and collaboration of manufacturers, especially SMEs and service providers, and to simplify the transition from on-premises production to cloud-based systems. With online tools, which enable the efficient co-creation of technical solutions, and with the “RAMP IIoT platform,” a FIWARE-based package that allows production data to be available on the cloud, RAMP accelerates the deployment of advanced manufacturing systems and enables production data to be swiftly utilized in future extensions with more cloud services. In this chapter, we look into the large-scale requirements analysis, which includes feedback from more than 200 manufacturers, developers and cloud service providers, to look into what are the features needed for the online collaboration of manufacturers and solution providers, as well as for the transition from shop floor to cloud-based production. We also review alternative implementations, tested across 90 real production use cases, including both online and cloud tools as well as different IIoT architectures, to analyze advantages, disadvantages, and user feedback for each implementation. In the end, we consolidate the results and shape the final overall RAMP offering, which effectively allows manufacturers to utilize cloud services with minimal time and cost.