Audi’s EC4P: The Reference Architecture

At the inception of EC4P, Audi began to explore new terrain. No carmaker before had so boldly created a plant architecture that takes advantage of all the efficiencies and conveniences of a modern IT-like architecture, and yet considers the specific priorities and requirements of the OT environment. At the time, the top IT consulting firms lacked domain-specific experience, so to create the future of the automotive plant architecture, Audi partnered with three key vendors: Cisco, Broadcom (VMware), and Siemens. Together, this team created the reference architecture that became the core of EC4P.
 

The EC4P Reference Architecture (Graphic: ARC)

Reference Architecture of EC4P
A reference architecture for the real-time specific aspects of EC4P (Edge Cloud for Production) was developed jointly by the EC4P team and its key suppliers. It covers the following three domains:

o    Shop floor: Manufacturing equipment, automation devices, networks
o    Enterprise network: Resilient, low-latency/high-bandwidth networking infrastructure connects all pieces in a scalable and secure manner.
o    Data center: EC4P virtualization platform hosts a variety of applications.

In addition, systems hosted on other private or public clouds can be connected to the EC4P Reference Architecture. This may include monitoring and logging, data engineering, management tools, and databases.

Where to Put the Data Center?
A key technical challenge faced by the EC4P team was the decision to place servers, for both time-critical and non-time critical application, an off-premises data centers. This is the true spirit of cloud computing, and Audi intends to apply this spirit to the manufacturing environments.

The servers are in data centers that serve multiple production sites located at varying distances (currently 6-13 kilometers) from the production sites due to server requirements (cooling, access control, failover batteries). The goal is to make the physical distance between data center and production site irrelevant, without sacrificing performance. According to the EC4P team, achieving this goal was only possible with the software-defined networking technologies from Cisco.

New ARC White Paper: 
ARC recently published a white paper on "Building Audi’s EC4P platform for shop floor virtualization"
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