Heterogeneous Applications, Tools, and Methodologies in the Car Manufacturing Industry Through an IoT Approach

Abstract

Due to the growth of industrial Internet services, todays production environment is on the edge of a new era of innovations and changes. This is taking place through the convergence of the global industrial system with the power of advanced computing, analytics, low-cost sensing, and new levels of connectivity enabled by the Internet of Things (IoT). These innovations will bring higher efficiency, flexibility, and interoperability among industries, although they belong to different production ecosystems. This paper describes an IoT platform and the related prototypes developed within the project: Enabling Business-Based Internet of Things and Services (ebbits), with a focus on the industrial domain. Heterogeneous applications were deployed and tested, including a wireless sensor and actuator network for industrial machines monitoring and a radio-frequency-identification-based system for operator management, locating, and authorization, which also includes an interactive user interface for portable devices to visualize real-time information from physical-world devices. Moreover, tools for model-driven development are used to simplify the process of building IoT applications. Those developments are based on IoT middleware that is developed and deployed by the project to enable the seamless integration of heterogeneous technologies and processes into mainstream enterprise systems. This paper also presents the prototypal deployment of the developed prototypes in the car manufacturing industry.