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Overview
After an unprecedented 3-year hiatus, the Hanover Fair returned last month in a more compact format, but with a surprisingly high level of enthusiasm among exhibitors and visitors. Tired of video conferences and virtual events, 75,000 industry players attended the 4-day event that was postponed earlier this year from its traditional April timeslot. Despite its reduced size, the show did not disappoint, and exhibitors expressed a high level of satisfaction with the quality of contacts. In short, it was great to be back.
A major focus of this year’s fair was “digital ecosystems” in industry. The most interesting exhibits and the largest crowds were to be found in the halls that hosted companies offering cloud and edge infrastructure, including digital platforms and industry-specific solutions for handling data. Another common theme was sustainability, which is gaining traction among industry suppliers as threats grow from global warming and tight energy markets.
Industrial Events Are on Again!
While the show was only a third of the size of the 2019 Hanover Fair in terms of both exhibitors and visitors, nearly all significant automation suppliers exhibited, plus a plethora of IT companies. Notable companies that stayed away were ABB (with B&R), Emerson Electric, Endress+Hauser, and Mitsubishi Electric.
Industry Discovers Data
Manufacturers deal with production data daily. However, the digital transformation journeys currently underway are leading to much higher amounts of data being generated, and many companies have neither the IT systems nor the right personnel in place to derive value from these data. This year’s fair was marked by a variety of small companies vying for the attention of industrial users plagued by this dilemma. Companies including Cognite, Sight Machine, Radix, Element Analytics, Crosser, and many more offer solutions that help industry users access, contextualize and even “democratize” industry data – a practice known as “industrial DataOps.”
Coopetition for IoT Platforms
How to explain the plethora of IoT offerings from small companies and start-ups? The availability of IoT and Industrial IoT platforms makes it possible. IoT platforms host apps of any size and provide a ready-made cloud infrastructure with deployment and connectivity tools. This allows app developers to focus most of their attention and engineering time on creating the app. With IoT platforms, the potential for a cottage industry of useful industrial apps is enormous.
Essentially two companies, Amazon Web Services and Microsoft, dominate the market for hosting IoT platforms. Users can use platforms and tools offered by either company, or they can select an industrial IoT platform from an industrial supplier like EcoStruxure (Schneider Electric) or MindSphere (Siemens). Regarding the platform, AWS or Microsoft usually provide the cloud hosting, resulting in an interesting form of “coopetition” between IT and OT suppliers.
PLC-as-a-Service
Software-defined-everything is common in the IT world as hardware-based functions are systematically being replaced by software. But can this concept be applied to real-time control of industrial machinery? The answer is YES, but only if the right framework is in place to program, deploy and monitor the performance of virtualized automation assets.
Software Defined Automation is the concept of virtualizing traditional automation hardware to manage it like a software asset. SDA is also the name of a start-up company that demonstrated its solution at the AWS partner booth at the Hanover Fair. The company’s PLC Ops Suite for automation engineers enables Industrial-Control-as-a-Service by virtualizing commercially available PLCs via a digital twin of the controller. Factory automation practitioners benefit from hardware independent remote connectivity, simplified collaborative PLC engineering, and virtual PLCs with real-time deterministic behavior running on standard IT hardware. The vPLC solution allows the execution of deterministic real-time control on virtualized edge servers in combination with a comprehensive vPLC management interface in the cloud. Together with Cloud Automation Engineering solution, it enables customers to improve flexibility, productivity, and security while at the same time gaining independence from vendor-specific industrial automation hardware.
SDA’s solution supports customers migrating from conventional PLCs to fully virtualized PLC controls running on the VMware Edge Compute Stack on conventional IT servers next to the shop floor. Automation engineers can continue to work with vPLCs as with conventional PLCs via a cloud-based control plane. SDA’s cloud application allows users to commission, manage, and monitor vPLC instances from servers located in the factory. According to SDA, virtual real-time controllers achieve deterministic control cycle times of <10ms.
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Keywords: Hanover Fair, IoT Platforms, Cloud, Edge, IT/OT Convergence, Sustainability, ARC Advisory Group.