Vorsprung through Culture: Inside Audi’s Software‑Driven Factory Transformation

KEYWORDS: Audi, EC4P, Virtualization, vPLC, Innovation Culture, CI/CD, Hypervisor, DevOps, GitHub

Overview

What motivated Audi to redesign its traditional shop floor architecture? The automotive industry is changing rapidly in the face of new cost structures driven by the electric vehicle transition and fierce competition from China. In Audi’s view, the traditional model of delivering production equipment floor is outdated, and the future is software-driven production.

Audi calls it “IT-based factory automation,” a concept that is turning IT/OT convergence theory into practice at the premium automaker. To achieve this, Audi kicked off an initiative back in 2018 called Edge Cloud 4 Production (EC4P). The goal is to replace thousands of shop floor industrial PCs with a much more efficient and flexible IT architecture of scalable local servers, effectively uniting the cloud and the edge on the shop floor.

This ARC View is part of a series of reports that dig deeper into the cultural and technical aspects of EC4P.

Key Takeaways

• Culture matters: Innovation mindset and early IT/OT stakeholder alignment were key success factors.
• Early stakeholder buy‑in drives success: Close involvement of OT maintenance teams and joint architecture sessions with ecosystem partners were critical to adoption and execution.
• Technology proves viability: Virtualized PLCs, industrial networking, and TÜV‑certified virtual safety PLCs demonstrate that mission‑critical, safety‑relevant automation can successfully run on a software‑defined, IT/OT architecture.

Audi Culture: Vorsprung durch Technik

The carmaker’s well-known motto Vorsprung durch Technik (advantage through technology) drives Audi’s company culture. Audi engineers are said to be driven by an innovation mindset, and their work is often described as experimental and transformation driven. Cross‑functional collaboration is encouraged, as is learning from errors. In the conservative hierarchy of today’s automotive industry, the freedom to innovate is tied to risks, but the rewards are great. This is the culture of the EC4P team in a nutshell.

EC4P provides evidence of this experiment-driven culture. The team began work in the early days of the IT/OT convergence just as the industry started to move away from proprietary solutions and accept open IT concepts and principles. The problem was that there was no experienced IT partner available who also understood the specific requirements and priorities of the shop floor environment. The convergence was in its infancy, so Audi looked to its ecosystem for the right partners to create the future of IT-based factory automation.

At its inception, the team asked itself a few simple questions:

• Can we get more out of shop floor hardware? 
• Can we make it smarter and optimize patching? 
• Must shop floor compute really be installed in electrical cabinets, or can it be operated remotely?

The team calculated that creating an IT architecture for the shop floor could increase flexibility, simplify rollouts, updates and security patches, and would integrate more tightly with the rest of the company’s IT landscape. On top of that, it would create a future‑proof foundation for AI, simulation, and digital twins. A key requirement was to consider the needs of workers by designing the backend so that shop floor staff wouldn’t notice any differences. The goal was “same screen, same workflow, same experience” - just powered by a virtual workstation instead of a physical PC.

DevOps on the Shop Floor

A key enabler of Audi’s IT based factory automation was the decision to adopt DevOps practices, well established in enterprise IT, within the OT environment. As part of the EC4P initiative, Audi has begun to apply Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) principles to the development, validation, and operation of shop floor software. This will represent a shift in how industrial automation software is developed and managed. For Audi, DevOps is expected to help introduce change in environments that traditionally prioritize stability, while maintaining a strong focus on production reliability.

DevOps supports the full software lifecycle, from requirements and development through testing, deployment, operations, and maintenance, using multiple environments to reduce risk. New functionality is developed and validated in a dedicated development environment, while a pre-production (staging) environment is used for quality assurance activities such as functional and performance testing. Changes are then deployed to production, which remains focused on stable and reliable operations, even as selected practices like canary releases or blue green deployments allow limited experimentation.

For shop floor applications, DevOps will support updates to the virtualization platform and automation software running on EC4P. For example, hypervisor updates can be tested for compatibility with hosted applications, and new or updated vPLC functionality can be validated before broader rollout. This approach allows unit and integration testing of newly (AI)-generated PLC code prior to production deployment, while supporting deployment tracking and operational monitoring.

Organizational Considerations

EC4P was a multi-company effort right from the start. Audi’s timeline was driven by production projects with fixed start-of-production dates, so it was imperative to align the activities of key partners, most notably Siemens, Cisco and Broadcom, to deliver the appropriate solutions at the right time, including successful interoperability testing.

Bringing IT structures into critical OT processes led Audi to establish an operational team with both IT and OT skillsets working in three shifts. Most companies today operate according to ITIL principles, the widely accepted framework of practices for IT service and asset management that focus on aligning IT services with the needs of the business. Service level agreements (SLA) with fast response times are common, but this still isn’t fast enough for OT, which needs to reach someone directly if a problem occurs. The EC4P operations team extends this OT mindset to the IT infrastructure and virtualized workloads.

The EC4P initiative reduced complexity on the shop floor despite the addition of layers to the whole solution (virtualization stack, automation tools, monitoring and logging, etc.). New stakeholders were added for networking and servers, as well as the EC4P operations team, to manage the virtualized workloads running on the EC4P platform. New processes were introduced to manage debugging issues in these distributed and connected systems.

How Did Audi Get It Done?

According to Audi, the success of EC4P was driven by early stakeholder buy‑in and the establishment of joint architecture sessions with its ecosystem partners. This involved maintaining close collaboration through rapid iterations and weekly synchronization. On the shop floor, acceptance was built by validating new concepts directly in the real production environment rather than limiting testing to laboratory demonstrations.

Securing the support of OT maintenance teams was critical, as they are responsible for operating and maintaining equipment within the EC4P architecture. Achieving this required close collaboration with automation planning, network, and server teams to align technical and operational requirements. Externally, Audi communicated both technical and cultural expectations to its supplier ecosystem through joint architecture sessions, working openly with experienced partners to co‑develop solutions in an exploratory manner without fear of early missteps.

Where IT Meets OT: Getting the Technology Right

The EC4P team relied on key partners Cisco and Broadcom to create an open plant architecture that would support the consolidation of shop floor hardware and greatly improve the management of plant software assets. Tapping into their vast experience, the IT partners helped Audi define and construct an IT architecture that also considers the special requirements of the OT environment. While typical IT priorities such as cybersecurity and data integrity, EC4P also prioritizes equipment availability and flexibility to guarantee the smooth, uninterrupted shop floor operations. Cisco helped incorporate Profinet into the architecture, an industrial version of Ethernet, together with PROFIsafe, an industrial safety protocol, while Broadcom added support for these in its industrial virtual switch.

A key part of the architecture is the virtualization of programmable logic controllers (PLC), a technology that was just emerging early in the program. Audi worked with Siemens to incorporate the Simatic S7-1500V, Siemens’ first virtualized version of its venerable S7 series of industrial controllers. While this vPLC is a drop-in replacement for previously used hardware-based PLCs, the EC4P team still had much to consider, including the hardware requirements to ensure real-time performance. Another consideration was the fact that shop floor staff are accustomed to the PLC being installed and accessible close to the process. For example, how does commissioning or maintenance work change now that the PLC is installed on a remote server?

After addressing the virtual PLC question, the EC4P team then turned to the next challenge: having the virtual PLC certified for safety operation. A safety PLC supports failsafe applications - a necessity in body shop, assembly, paint shop, and most automated production cells where human safety is at stake. Siemens responded by introducing the Simatic S7-1517VF, which it claims is the first-ever TÜV-certified virtual failsafe PLC. According to Siemens, TÜV certification was straightforward and similar to that of a classic hardware-based PLC.

Conclusion

Audi’s Edge Cloud 4 Production (EC4P) initiative demonstrates how innovation culture, combined with disciplined execution, can reshape industrial automation. By redefining the shop floor as a software‑defined environment, Audi has shown that IT‑based automation can meet stringent automotive requirements for availability, performance, and safety while materially improving flexibility and scalability. TÜV‑certified virtual safety PLCs further validate that even mission‑critical workloads can run reliably on a modern IT/OT architecture. Enabled by early stakeholder alignment, strong ecosystem collaboration, and the adoption of DevOps practices, this cultural transformation is only beginning, and is already serving as a powerful accelerator for the ongoing EC4P journey.

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