Industrial DevOps

The visions and ideas of Industry 4.0 require a profound interconnection of machines, plants, and IT systems in industrial production environments. This significantly increases the importance of software, which is coincidentally one of the main obstacles to the introduction of Industry 4.0. Lack of experience and knowledge, high investment and maintenance costs, as well as uncertainty about future developments cause many small and medium-sized enterprises hesitating to adopt Industry 4.0 solutions. We propose Industrial DevOps as an approach to introduce methods and culture of DevOps into industrial production environments. The fundamental concept of this approach is a continuous process of operation, observation, and development of the entire production environment. This way, all stakeholders, systems, and data can thus be integrated via incremental steps and adjustments can be made quickly. Furthermore, we present the Titan software platform accompanied by a role model for integrating production environments with Industrial DevOps. In two initial industrial application scenarios, we address the challenges of energy management and predictive maintenance with the methods, organizational structures, and tools of Industrial DevOps.Comment: 10 page

Abschlussbericht KMU-innovativ: Verbundprojekt Titan Industrial DevOps Plattform für iterative Prozessintegration und Automatisierung

Unternehmensprozesse zu digitalisieren und dabei eine IT-Infrastruktur aufzubauen, ist komplex. Neue, zum Teil teure Technologien werden eingesetzt, jedoch fehlen erprobte Praktiken. Die daraus entstehende Komplexität lässt sich mit dem klassischen Projektmodell nur ungenügend adressieren. Klassische Planungen basieren auf Annahmen, die sich oft zu spät und als falsch erweisen. Mechanismen, den einmal geplanten Weg zum gesetzten Ziel zu korrigieren, bietet das traditionelle Projektmodell nur eingeschränkt. Ziel des titan-Projekts ist die Integration von Entwicklungswerkzeugen und Betriebs-Technologie in eine Software-Plattform. Kombiniert mit innovativen „Industrial DevOps“- Methoden soll die komplexe Aufgabe einer iterativen Systemintegration im industriellen Umfeld erheblich vereinfacht werden. Im titan-Projekt ist der Prototyp einer Software-Plattform entstanden, die es industriellen Anwendern erlaubt, diese Praktiken auf Problemstellungen der Digitalisierung anzuwenden. Neben Zielen wie Sicherstellung und Überprüfbarkeit von Qualität, Widerstandsfähigkeit und Skalierbarkeit ist die Eliminierung des Vendor-Lock-In ein zentraler Aspekt des Projekts. Insbesondere werden Prozessanpassungen durch die Anwender mittels Flow Based Automation ermöglicht, neue Softwareversionen und Veränderungen können am System routinemäßig in Betrieb genommen werden und domänenspezifische Komponenten können für komplexe Aufgaben genutzt und verwaltet werden. Im Rahmen einer Community wird die titan-Open-Source-Plattform weiterentwickelt. Die während des Projekts entstandenen Innovationen werden so verfeinert und in verschiedenen Bereichen angewendet. Die Erfahrungen aus Projekten fließen in die Software ein und werden innerhalb der Community verbreitet

Embedded Software Development with Digital Twins: Specific Requirements for Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises

The transformation to Industry 4.0 changes the way embedded software systems are developed. Digital twins have the potential for cost-effective software development and maintenance strategies. With reduced costs and faster development cycles, small and medium-sized enterprises (SME) have the chance to grow with new smart products. We interviewed SMEs about their current development processes. In this paper, we present the first results of these interviews. First results show that real-time requirements prevent, to date, a Software-in-the-Loop development approach, due to a lack of proper tooling. Security/safety concerns, and the accessibility of hardware are the main impediments. Only temporary access to the hardware leads to Software-in-the-Loop development approaches based on simulations/emulators. Yet, this is not in all use cases possible. All interviewees see the potential of Software-in-the-Loop approaches and digital twins with regard to quality and customization. One reason it will take some effort to convince engineers, is the conservative nature of the embedded community, particularly in SMEs.Comment: 6 pages, 1 figure, 2 tables, conference, In Proceedings Of The 2023 IEEE International Conference on Digital Twin (Digital Twin 2023

Scalability Benchmarking of Cloud-Native Applications Applied to Event-Driven Microservices

Cloud-native applications constitute a recent trend for designing large-scale software systems. This thesis introduces the Theodolite benchmarking method, allowing researchers and practitioners to conduct empirical scalability evaluations of cloud-native applications, their frameworks, configurations, and deployments. The benchmarking method is applied to event-driven microservices, a specific type of cloud-native applications that employ distributed stream processing frameworks to scale with massive data volumes. Extensive experimental evaluations benchmark and compare the scalability of various stream processing frameworks under different configurations and deployments, including different public and private cloud environments. These experiments show that the presented benchmarking method provides statistically sound results in an adequate amount of time. In addition, three case studies demonstrate that the Theodolite benchmarking method can be applied to a wide range of applications beyond stream processing

DevOps Adoption: Challenges & Barriers

As a modern software engineering paradigm, DevOps has recently gained increasing acceptance in the industry as a set of practices and cultural values to address daily dynamic software demands. While the rising trend of DevOps and its characteristics and challenges have often been characterized by practitioner communities and academic research circles, there is still a lack of a thorough understanding of how to tackle DevOps adoptions. This paper aims to help fill this gap by identifying, discussing, and summarizing current academic and practitioner DevOps adoption & implementation research. Our findings provide a basis for theoretical, empirical, or design-oriented research for IS scholars, that has the potential to be of practical importance. Our goal is to improve understanding of DevOps adoption by uncovering ambiguities in terms, conceptual conflations, and ideas underlying different uses of the concept as well as providing methods to deal with common challenges in the adoption process