Industrial DevOps
This addresses the problem of software integration and cost barriers for small and medium-sized enterprises in adopting Industry 4.0, though it appears incremental by adapting existing DevOps concepts to a new domain.
The paper tackles the challenge of software as a major obstacle to Industry 4.0 adoption by small and medium-sized enterprises, proposing Industrial DevOps to integrate DevOps methods into industrial production environments, with initial application in energy management and predictive maintenance scenarios.
The visions and ideas of Industry 4.0 require a profound interconnection of machines, plants, and IT systems in industrial production environments. This significantly increases the importance of software, which is coincidentally one of the main obstacles to the introduction of Industry 4.0. Lack of experience and knowledge, high investment and maintenance costs, as well as uncertainty about future developments cause many small and medium-sized enterprises hesitating to adopt Industry 4.0 solutions. We propose Industrial DevOps as an approach to introduce methods and culture of DevOps into industrial production environments. The fundamental concept of this approach is a continuous process of operation, observation, and development of the entire production environment. This way, all stakeholders, systems, and data can thus be integrated via incremental steps and adjustments can be made quickly. Furthermore, we present the Titan software platform accompanied by a role model for integrating production environments with Industrial DevOps. In two initial industrial application scenarios, we address the challenges of energy management and predictive maintenance with the methods, organizational structures, and tools of Industrial DevOps.