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Edge appliance targets car-makers and their suppliers
Rittal and two of its sister companies in the Friedhelm Loh Group – German Edge Cloud and IoTOS – have joined forces with Bosch Connected Industry to launch an edge computing appliance that will allow manufacturers to extract extra value from their production data. Called Oncite, the appliance is an open IIoT platform combined with an edge cloud datacentre.
The technology is aimed, in particular, car-makers and their suppliers. “Automotive suppliers currently face a major challenge,” explains Dr Sebastian Ritz, managing director of German Edge Cloud. “VW and BMW recently launched a digitalisation initiative by setting up their own digital production platforms. Their suppliers, with up to 100,000 factories, need to adapt to these as well as to the subsequent platforms of the other car manufacturers and top-tier suppliers. However, the suppliers want to retain control of their production data without risking their supplier status. They need an affordable ‘plug-and-produce solution’.”
Oncite will enable secure data exchange across the automotive supply chain, and with the upcoming digital production platforms of the car-makers and other suppliers. It is based on a highly available and scalable edge cloud datacentre which records, stores, processes and evaluates data rapidly and locally.
“By holding all the data on site, the user retains full control and decides whether and how to transfer the processed data to the various digital production platforms of the OEMs and top-tier suppliers,” Ritz explains. “IoT platforms such as SupplyOn or Siemens’ Mindsphere can be used to store data and to exchange production-relevant information with customers and suppliers, while control over data is maintained.”
