At the Edge of Industry 4.0

Abstract

This research investigates the impact of edge agents on industrial plants in the era of the Internet of Things (IoT) and the increasing availability of internet connection. This paper proposes ‘Edge Agent’ a holistic solution to managing many devices on the edge and will give a brief introduction to the communication between agents and existing machinery as well as present results which were extracted from experiments performed with our solution under low load in terms of data and with a small number of devices in terms of distribution. As result of extensive architecture investigation for an optimal edge solution and its possible correlation to industrial applications, this paper will introduce edge agents, communication between agents and machinery and industrial applications. The paper will present some important findings on edge computing, compare main architectural aspects and will provide a broad view of how edge solutions might be built for this particular scenario. Having discussed how the ideal architecture works and having provided an overview about how it may be applied to industrial plants, the final section of this paper addresses how artificial intelligence will fit into edge solutions, introducing important trends like the one-shot-learning technique, forming a new source of “smart capabilities” to existing environments.