Production increased by 20 percent with its own IIoT platform

Edge and cloud are growing together. But standard platforms are not designed for this. High-performance in-house developments perform better, as the example of thyssenkrupp Materials IoT shows.

The digital connection of the extreme ends of machines and systems with the corresponding cloud platforms leads to enormous increases in efficiency.

It is primarily manufacturing companies that are significantly expanding their edge solutions, for example to implement real-time applications directly on site. Often this is the only way to maintain the mostly low latencies. At the same time, more and more industry-specific offers are emerging in the cloud, so that these two ends of the infrastructure are growing closer and closer together. Edge-to-Cloud (E2C) is what this trend is called, and it is becoming more and more popular.

In a way, edge and cloud are complementary and competing at the same time. This means that they complement each other in the form of a comprehensive topology, but also take away each other's tasks. "Edge computing is the perfect counterpart to the cloud because it eliminates many of the cloud's weaknesses," says Gartner analyst Bob Gill. The Forrester analysts even believe that by further devolution to the Edge cloud growth could be lower this year up to five percentage points.

Unfortunately, the large hyperscaler platforms only offer a few options for mapping the specific requirements and the grown industrial solutions in their cloud platforms. Gartner found that by the end of 2020, only one percent of edge computing platforms were implemented on a hyperscaler. The other 99 percent, on the other hand, were operated on platforms that industrial companies set up in the form of their own industrial clouds.

Fully automatic from order to delivery

In the modern world of fully digitized production, the subsequent production processes are started automatically after an order is received. At the same time, the system protects the production facilities from unplanned downtimes and supply-related disruptions. In this way, the production costs can be reduced considerably.

One such production method was the idea with which thyssenkrupp Materials IoT (tkMIoT) wanted to improve the productivity of more than 4,500 production machines . One problem with this: the often non-standardized production settings were not allowed to change as a result.

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