Industry 4.0: The Future of Indo-German Industrial Collaboration

Industry 4.0 can be described as the fourth industrial revolution, a mega- trend that affects every company around the world. It envisions interconnections and collaboration between people, products and machines within and across enterprises. Why does Industry 4.0 make for an excellent platform for industrial collaboration between India and Germany? The answers lie in economic as well as social factors. Both countries have strengths and weakness and strategic collaboration using the principles of Industry 4.0 can help both increase their industrial output, GDP and make optimal use of human resources. As a global heavy weight in manufacturing and machine export, Germany has a leading position in the development and deployment of Industry 4.0 concepts and technology. However, its IT sector, formed by a labor force of 800,000 employees, is not enough. It needs more professionals to reach its full potential. India, on the other hand, is a global leader in IT and business process outsourcing. But its manufacturing industry needs to grow significantly and compete globally. These realities clearly show the need for Industry 4.0-based collaboration between Germany and India. So how does Industry 4.0 work? In a first step, we look at the technical pers- pective – the vertical and horizontal integration of Industry 4.0 principles in enterprises. Vertical integration refers to operations within Smart Factories and horizontal integration to Smart Supply Chains across businesses. In the second step, we look at manufacturing, chemical industry and the IT sector as potential targets for collaboration between the two countries. We use case studies to illustrate the benefits of the deployment of Industry 4.0. Potential collaboration patterns are discussed along different forms of value chains and along companies’ ability to achieve Industry 4.0 status. We analyse the social impact of Industry 4.0 on India and Germany and find that it works very well in the coming years. Germany with its dwindling labor force might be compensated through the automation. This will ensure continued high productivity levels and rise in GDP. India, on the other hand has a burgeoning labor market, with 10 million workers annually entering the job market. Given that the manufacturing sector will be at par with Europe in efficiency and costs by 2023, pressure on India’s labor force will increase even more. Even its robust IT sector will suffer fewer hires because of increased automation. Rapid development of technologies – for the Internet of Things (IoT) or for connectivity like Low-Power WAN – makes skilling and reskilling of the labor force critical for augmenting smart manufacturing. India and Germany have been collaborating at three levels relevant to Industry 4.0 – industry, government and academics. How can these be taken forward? The two countries have a long history of trade. The Indo-German Chamber of Commerce (IGCC) is the largest such chamber in India and the largest German chamber worldwide. VDMA (Verband Deutscher Maschinen- und Anlagenbau, Mechanical Engineering Industry Association), the largest industry association in Europe, maintains offices in India. Indian key players in IT, in turn, have subsidia- ries in Germany and cooperate with German companies in the area of Industry 4.0. Collaboration is also supported on governmental level. As government initiatives go, India has launched the “Make in India” initiative and the “Make in India Mittelstand! (MIIM)” programme as a part of it. The Indian Government is also supporting “smart manufacturing” initiatives in a major way. Centers of Excellence driven by the industry and academic bodies are being set up. Germany and India have a long tradition of research collaboration as well. Germany is the second scientific collaborator of India and Indian students form the third largest group of foreign students in Germany. German institutions like the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) or the German House for Research and Innovation (DWIH) are working to strengthen ties between the scientific communities of the two countries, and between their academia and industry. What prevents Industry 4.0 from becoming a more widely used technology? Recent surveys in Germany and India show that awareness about Industry 4.0 is still low, especially among small and medium manufacturing enterprises. IT companies, on the other hand, are better prepared. There is a broad demand for support, regarding customtailored solutions, information on case studies and the willingness to participate in Industry 4.0 pilot projects and to engage in its platform and networking activities. We also found similar responses at workshops conducted with Industry 4.0 stakehold- ers in June 2017 in Bangalore and Pune and in an online survey. What can be done to change this? Both countries should strengthen their efforts to create awareness for Industry 4.0, especially among small and medium enterprises. Germany should also put more emphasis on making their Industry 4.0 technology known to the Indian market. India’s IT giants, on the other hand, should make their Industry 4.0 offers more visible to the German market. The governments should support the establishing of joint Industry 4.0 collaboration platforms, centers of excellence and incubators to ease the dissemination of knowledge and technology. On academic level, joint research programs and exchange programs should be set up to foster the skilling of labor force in the deployment of Industry 4.0 methods and technologies

A Study to Optimize Heterogeneous Resources for Open IoT

Recently, IoT technologies have been progressed, and many sensors and actuators are connected to networks. Previously, IoT services were developed by vertical integration style. But now Open IoT concept has attracted attentions which achieves various IoT services by integrating horizontal separated devices and services. For Open IoT era, we have proposed the Tacit Computing technology to discover the devices with necessary data for users on demand and use them dynamically. We also implemented elemental technologies of Tacit Computing. In this paper, we propose three layers optimizations to reduce operation cost and improve performance of Tacit computing service, in order to make as a continuous service of discovered devices by Tacit Computing. In optimization process, appropriate function allocation or offloading specific functions are calculated on device, network and cloud layer before full-scale operation.Comment: 3 pages, 1 figure, 2017 Fifth International Symposium on Computing and Networking (CANDAR2017), Nov. 201

ClouNS - A Cloud-native Application Reference Model for Enterprise Architects

The capability to operate cloud-native applications can generate enormous business growth and value. But enterprise architects should be aware that cloud-native applications are vulnerable to vendor lock-in. We investigated cloud-native application design principles, public cloud service providers, and industrial cloud standards. All results indicate that most cloud service categories seem to foster vendor lock-in situations which might be especially problematic for enterprise architectures. This might sound disillusioning at first. However, we present a reference model for cloud-native applications that relies only on a small subset of well standardized IaaS services. The reference model can be used for codifying cloud technologies. It can guide technology identification, classification, adoption, research and development processes for cloud-native application and for vendor lock-in aware enterprise architecture engineering methodologies

Challenges for the comprehensive management of cloud services in a PaaS framework

The 4CaaSt project aims at developing a PaaS framework that enables flexible definition, marketing, deployment and management of Cloud-based services and applications. The major innovations proposed by 4CaaSt are the blueprint and its lifecycle management, a one stop shop for Cloud services and a PaaS level resource management featuring elasticity. 4CaaSt also provides a portfolio of ready to use Cloud native services and Cloud-aware immigrant technologies

Recent advances in industrial wireless sensor networks towards efficient management in IoT

With the accelerated development of Internet-of- Things (IoT), wireless sensor networks (WSN) are gaining importance in the continued advancement of information and communication technologies, and have been connected and integrated with Internet in vast industrial applications. However, given the fact that most wireless sensor devices are resource constrained and operate on batteries, the communication overhead and power consumption are therefore important issues for wireless sensor networks design. In order to efficiently manage these wireless sensor devices in a unified manner, the industrial authorities should be able to provide a network infrastructure supporting various WSN applications and services that facilitate the management of sensor-equipped real-world entities. This paper presents an overview of industrial ecosystem, technical architecture, industrial device management standards and our latest research activity in developing a WSN management system. The key approach to enable efficient and reliable management of WSN within such an infrastructure is a cross layer design of lightweight and cloud-based RESTful web service

BonFIRE: A multi-cloud test facility for internet of services experimentation

BonFIRE offers a Future Internet, multi-site, cloud testbed, targeted at the Internet of Services community, that supports large scale testing of applications, services and systems over multiple, geographically distributed, heterogeneous cloud testbeds. The aim of BonFIRE is to provide an infrastructure that gives experimenters the ability to control and monitor the execution of their experiments to a degree that is not found in traditional cloud facilities. The BonFIRE architecture has been designed to support key functionalities such as: resource management; monitoring of virtual and physical infrastructure metrics; elasticity; single document experiment descriptions; and scheduling. As for January 2012 BonFIRE release 2 is operational, supporting seven pilot experiments. Future releases will enhance the offering, including the interconnecting with networking facilities to provide access to routers, switches and bandwidth-on-demand systems. BonFIRE will be open for general use late 2012