A manufacturer employee uses a laser cutter machinery to carry out its functions. In order to embrace the digital transformation it would like to start collecting data to build application that will be able to:
The manufacturer could follow two different approaches, an Informatization and business intelligence one and a digital manufacturing platform one.
In this approach the manufacturer will try to build applications to reach the goals. For each application he will try to collect the information from the MES system which is already integrated with the PLC that is in charge of driving the cutting machine. Moreover for each application it will be necessary to build some batch in order to collect the information from the MES database and send those information to the destination application. Each destination application will handle the batch to collect the data. Each application:
The MES system will complain of the load produced by these new external extractions and each time it need to deploy a new version a test session has to be coordinated among all applications.
In the digital platform scenario the PLC communicates with an edge Gateway that will produce standard messages for the cutter machinery operations. The new application only need to subscribe to these messages without impacting any other applications. In this way the application will receive real time messages. The digital platform
In this case adding, removing, modifying an application will not impact any other.