An Open Platform for Smart Production: IT/OT Integration in a Smart Factory

As industries are becoming increasingly digitalized, new manufacturing concepts require redesigning the information systems architecture. The Smart Production Laboratory is used as a learning factory aimed at exploring new industry 4.0 technologies and for demonstrating Smart Production solutions. The initial Smart Production Laboratory was built on a proprietary software stack. Experimenting with the information systems architecture using proprietary systems has shown to be difficult, which is why we built a complete modular open-source software stack for the Smart Production Laboratory intended to enable high-speed and low-cost development of demonstrators for research, teaching, and innovation. Therefore, the purpose of this research is to capture the development of the software stack and identify the required target architecture for the platform. This is further used for discussing potential future challenges in demonstrating new and innovative Smart Production concepts.