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