SIRDAM4.0: a Support Infrastructure for Reliable Data Acquisition and Management in Industry 4.0

The main claim of the Industry 4.0 manifesto (I4.0) is the promise of a significant transformation of production and delivery processes due to the digitization of manufacturing. A mandatory requirement of the I4.0 transition is the pervasive adoption of Information Technologies (IT), such as Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), Cyber-physical Systems (CPS), and Big Data, starting with business management departments down to production sites. Despite IT has reached a consistent maturity level, its integration with Operation Technology (OT) is still a mostly unresolved challenge. In this paper, we propose the design of a platform that supports reliable data gathering and sharing among OT and IT layers of an industrial manufacturing company, while also putting the basis for straightforward integration of business stakeholders in the data sharing loop. By leveraging widely used open-source tools, we implemented a software prototype of the platform that Small Medium Enterprises can use to face the IT/OT convergence challenge in an affordable way. Results collected from an extensive assessment in real manufacturing settings show that the proposed solution allows meeting both functional and non-functional requirements of a typical data gathering/sharing process in a near-real-time scenario, by granting reliability with very low overhead cost.