The digital factory with Azure IoT Edge
Building a framework for an Industrial Service Bus with Azure IoT Edge
Co-Authors: Daniel Trauth, Nils van Ouwerkerk, Felix Mönckemeyer
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Introduction
The ongoing digitalization of machines and the resulting growing amounts of data often lead to pre-processing of machine data before it is forwarded to the cloud. Short latency times and the possibility of keeping selected, security-critical data only locally motivates this approach additionally. The advantages of cloud-based solutions are not given up at this point, if the Industrial Service Bus creates an infrastructure, which guarantees high availability, high failure safety, but also simple maintenance.
What is an Industrial Service Bus (ISB)?
An Industrial Service Bus refers to the central bus system that connects various entities in a company down to the workshop level and represents the central communication bus. This instance enables an exchange, an enrichment or also a local preprocessing of machine data.
What is Azure IOT Edge ?
Azure IoT Edge is a local solution based on Azure IoT Hub that migrates cloud workloads such as artificial intelligence, Azure and third-party services or proprietary business logic to the edge of the network. This allows less time to be spent communicating with the cloud, quicker reactions to local changes, and ensures productivity even, if the Internet connection is down for an extended period of time.
Proof of Concept
The open source project for the Industrial Service Bus with Azure IoT Edge [1] launched by Microsoft in March focused on the creation of a framework to help companies make the transition to a digital factory. Together with more than 30 participants such as Intel, HPE, Zeiss and many others, Senseering was able to contribute to both the central requirements and the concrete implementation of a proof of concept.
Central requirements included high availability, data governance and the stability of the solution even if the connection to the cloud is lost. In order to be able to adapt to the respective specifications of the communication of machines in each company, it is important to construct this solution independently of the technology used for the ISB. A complete list of requirements can be found in [2].
The team succeeded in carrying out a proof of concept with RabbitMQ [3] as the technology for the ISB and to realize such a network in an exemplary way. In this step, simulated machine data was sent to an Azure IoT Edge instance via OPC-UA and forwarded to the ISB with the help of Dapr [4]. In parallel, this data was synchronized with the Azure IoT Hub (see figure).
Also the receiving and processing of data via the ISB is possible, which allows a complete communication between machines.
How SE might help you?
Local pre-processing is a practice that we at senseering encounter in many of our own as well as customers machines and have already implemented with our AI Manager and the myDataEconomy platform. We offer both indirect support, through further development of the open source project [3], as well as direct help with the implementation of Azure IoT Edge solutions. Your company is looking for a machine economy with local pre-processing, exchange and enrichment with easy deployment from the cloud? Contact us!
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