Towards Industrial Control from the Edge-Cloud: A Structural Analysis of Adoption Challenges According to Industrial Experts

The migration of industrial controls to an edge-cloud hosted on factory premises can reduce operation costs and increase the interoperability and flexibility of industrial machines. However, the adoption of Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) technologies to realize an industrial edge-cloud for factory automation is likely to lead to a number of challenges that have not yet been investigated. Based on an expert interviews study, this paper provides two main contributions: (1) the identification of 11 technology-, engineering-, organization-, and strategy-related challenges that, according to industrial experts, will hinder the adoption of edge-cloud control (ECC) in future factories, (2) the derivation of a structural model showing how challenges are interlinked. The results illustrate the dependency between profitability and both engineering and operation of an ECC system, suggesting the importance of improving the usability of ECC for automation experts with limited IT know-how, for instance through the reorganization of departments and the standardization of integration concepts for ECC in factories.