The industrial panorama is evolving. Using IoT sensors and actuators it is possible to increase product's value, by controlling its production chain. Internet technologies such as FIWARE can provide the services that modern industry needs to process and evaluate sensor data to apply higher production standards, which increase product value. Although FIWARE enablers provide the tools to fulfil modern industry needs, there is an interoperability gap a gap between applications and enablers, as different enablers have different protocols and needs. This article describes an agriculture system developed using vf-OS (virtual factory Operating System), a platform that aims to become the bridge between applications and enablers, as it provides the means to interact with them. The developed system is composed of different applications, that use enablers (integrated using the vf-OS system), current context management and fruit quality theories, to control product quality during the whole fruit production chain.
With the introduction of paradigms like Internet of Things, Cyber Physical Systems and Cloud Computing, Smart Factories are becoming a central part of today's manufacturing systems. Even though there already are some solutions in the market the full potential for smart manufacturing hasn't yet been achieved. In order to fulfil the gap European researchers are developing vf-OS, a platform that aims to be the future reference in future factories operating systems. In this work is presented some preliminary results regarding the modules related to IoT, event processing, situational awareness and data harmonization that are being researched in the scope of vf-OS to achieve holistic solution for industries, specifically targeting the agriculture domain.
In the last decades, the increasing complexity of industrial information technology has led to the emergence of new trends in manufacturing. Factories are using multiple Internet of Things (IoT) platforms to harvest sensor information to improve production. Such a transformation contributes to efficiency growth and reduced production costs. To deal with the heterogeneity of the services within an IoT system, Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is referred to in the literature as being advantageous for the design and development of software to support IoT-based production processes. The aim of SOA-based design is to provide the leverage to use and reuse loosely coupled IoT services at the middleware layer to minimise system integration problems. We propose a system architecture that follows the SOA architectural pattern and enables developers and business process designers to dynamically add, query or use instances of existing modular software in the IoT context. Furthermore, an analysis of utilization of modular software that presents some challenges and limitations of this approach is also in the scope of this work.
The vf-OS project aims to develop a middleware platform for the virtual factory of the future. The vf-OS is composed of several modules providing interoperability mechanisms for systems to exchange real-time data. Moreover, it enables the managing of data flows, transforming data, providing open API's to ease integration process. The proposed Data Management Component (DMC) intends to cover the issues related to data handling, pre-processing, extracting, and data flows management for Virtual Factories. It integrates four subcomponents: a data infrastructure middleware element that handles the data communications; a data storage mechanism able to work with high loads and triples; a semantic and mapping function to establish model information integration; and an analytical module composed by machine learning and prediction mechanisms to enable knowledge extraction from the vast amount of data generated by the associated virtual factory system.
The increasing complexity in industrial and information technology in the last decades forced the manufacturing process to adapt to these new evolution trends. Factories are using the advancement of the Internet of Things (IoT) to have multiple platforms with sensorial information into their factory processes, to improve and reduce the costs of their products and increase their profit. To address these complexes and useful computations, the vf-OS (Virtual Open Operating System) aims to facilitate the development of applications using their individual components as well as FIWARE enablers.
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