The Industrial Internet Consortium (IIC), now incorporating OpenFog, and Plattform Industrie 4.0 announced that they have deepened their relationship with more joint projects. The two organizations work together to drive global interoperability and advance the IIoT. Leaders from each organization will be available to discuss their joint projects at Hannover Messe.
The first of these new joint projects undertaken by the two organizations will focus on security, edge computing, Industry 4.0 components and digital twin. To demonstrate and validate that the concepts and standards work, the two will produce a whitepaper on a common understanding of digital twins as well as set-up joint testbeds.
"Plattform Industrie 4.0 was the first agreement we signed with a national organization three years ago and our joint work has been working extremely well," said IIC executive director Dr. Richard Soley. "We enjoy shared goals for the manufacturing space and complement each other well with Plattform Industrie 4.0’s depth of knowledge in manufacturing and supply chain and our horizontal view across many industries."
"This is good news for the industry that IIC and Plattform Industrie 4.0 are working together," said SAP president digital supply chain & manufacturing Hala Zeine. "There is an evolution of digital twin going on right now and it’s important that the two most influential organizations driving IIoT and Industry 4.0 are so closely aligned. Industry standards only work if everyone agrees to the same standard. Ensuring global collaboration makes a lot of sense and is good for the entire supply chain."
In addition to their joint projects, IIC and Plattform Industrie 4.0 plan to launch joint testbeds. One potential testbed complementary to both organizations is the IIC Smart Factory Web testbed, operated by IIC since Sept. 2016 and led by Fraunhofer IOSB and KETI, with participants Microsoft and SAP. This testbed investigates integrated architectures and technologies for a web of distributed smart factories based upon the international standards OPC UA and AutomationML. Next, digital twins based on the concepts of the asset administration shell of the Plattform Industrie 4.0 will be evaluated. This testbed will be demonstrated at the IIC member pavilion at Hannover Messe.
At the Plattform Industrie 4.0 pavilion the first interoperable asset administration shells developed conformant to the development-ready specifications of the asset administration shell of the Plattform Industrie 4.0 will be presented.
The two organizations first demonstrated their collaboration at Hannover Messe 2017 where they presented a joint real-time demonstration that showed the IIC Industrial Internet Security Framework and the concepts of secure cooperation in cross company environments developed by the Plattform Industrie 4.0.
In 2018, IIC and Plattform Industrie 4.0 published a joint whitepaper, Architecture Alignment and Interoperability, which documents the complementary nature of, and details the mapping and alignment between, their two IIoT reference architecture models: the IIC Industrial Internet Reference Architecture (IIRA) and the Plattform Industrie 4.0 Reference Architectural Model Industrie 4.0 (RAMI 4.0).
