A Service for Resilient Manufacturing

Abstract

In modern industry, adaptation to market changes, as well as prompt reaction to a variety of predictable and unpredictable events, is a key requirement. Ubiquitous computing, real-time analytics, reconfigurable hardware/software components, often coexist in the complex, internally variegated, and often proprietary systems that are traditionally deployed to meet such requirement. However, such tailor-made systems meet only in part the requirements of openness, security, monitorability, geographical distribution, and most of all, remote extendability and changeability, which are crucial for prompt reaction to unforeseen circumstances. In this work, a containerized service application named Network Factory is presented. It enables the remote construction, configuration and operation of resilient computation systems that meet the above-mentioned requirements, and distinguish for their logical simplicity and for the uniform addressing of elaborations and human-computer interfaces, which are achieved through few reconfigurable components and communication mechanisms that are used from the production line up to the Cloud. Source code, documentation, and step-by-step introductory guides are publicly available in a dedicated GitHub repository, and distributed under the CC-BY-4.0 license.