Abstract
The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) poses multiple challenges to traditional standardization, due to the complexity, dynamics, and accelerating speed of technological progress. The need for a timely availability of standards calls for new approaches and tools to enhance standardization processes for smart manufacturing. Industry and standards development organizations worldwide are seeking new solutions. Testbeds have been acknowledged in innovation policy as a powerful tool for knowledge transfer and the further development of emerging technologies. Lately, they have also attracted increasing attention from the standardization perspective as a promising tool for a more agile standards development process. Proponents of such testbeds expect them to support standardization by providing validated solutions and accelerating the processes to meet the growing demands for faster standardization without any detriment to quality. In an explorative, qualitative approach this article is the first to investigate the operation and impact of testbeds in standardization processes based on a multiple case study on testbeds implemented worldwide in the context of the IIoT.
Highlights
W ITH the growing complexity, accelerated technological development, and increasing need for interoperability that come with the digital transformation of industry into smart manufacturing systems (Industry 4.0), standardization faces growing challenges to develop timely and high-quality standards [1]
Since not all testbeds run by the platform initiatives covered deal with standards and standardization, the testbeds had to be preselected in a first step through extensive desk research of the respective platform databases provided on their websites and the corresponding published reports or media releases
Based on an exploratory multiple case study approach, this article contributed a first assessment of testbeds of several Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) platforms worldwide and their contributions to the development of interoperability standards
Summary
W ITH the growing complexity, accelerated technological development, and increasing need for interoperability that come with the digital transformation of industry into smart manufacturing systems (Industry 4.0), standardization faces growing challenges to develop timely and high-quality standards [1]. Stakeholders are seeking new tools and approaches that could help meet this challenge. Testbeds as controlled experimentation platforms where specific use cases can be implemented [2] are attracting ever more attention [3]. They have been implemented worldwide, and increasingly are pooled in dedicated platform organizations established to support and promote interoperability in smart manufacturing.
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