Enabling Smart Manufacturing by Empowering Data Integration with Industrial IoT Support

ndustry 4.0 (I4.0) denotes the start of a new era where another industrial revolution is urged to explode. Simply put, I4.0 aims at enhancing the competitiveness in the manufacturing industry, while at the same time improving the safety and security of work centers. The achievement of that goal is bound to the adoption of enabling information technologies (IoT, Cloud, Big Data) to build a unified and integrated view of the information generated at all stages of the industrial processes, both operational and business oriented ones. This paper focuses on the need for manufacturing companies of tools that concretely implement this data integration as a requirement to enforce the improvements fostered and needed by the I4.0 revolution. This paper follows a former work that proposed the design and implementation of a platform realizing the integration of the operational and the business views at the data level. We enhanced the existing platform features by introducing new component that implements the interface with IoT devices via well-known communication protocols, namely MQTT and AMQP. Experiments run to test the newly introduced feature show the viability of the proposed approach with respect to the time constraints that are typical of a manufacturing production environment