Abstract—This paper presents our architectural approach to building a collaborative Industry 4.0 platform that enables IoT-based real-time monitoring, optimization and negotiation in manufacturing supply chains. The platform is called NIMBLE and is currently being developed in a European research project. The presented approach utilizes microservice technology, and implements the core business functionality of the platform through a composition of decentralized, scalable services. The communication among services, and with platform users, manufacturers, suppliers, sensors and Web resources, is supported through simple protocols and lightweight mechanisms. Core business services of the implemented architecture are released as open source software, enabling multiple prospective platform-providers to establish B2B marketplaces for collaboration within their own industrial sector or region. To demonstrate microservices in practice, we present two scenarios, both related to manufacturing of wooden home buildings: one is IoT-based data sharing in a supply chain, and the other deals with product driven logistics planning. The further development of the platform will be driven by the requirements of at least four different use cases throughout Europe, and by incorporating advanced business models to support the growth of powerful network effects of the platform. Project center in tirunelveli
The IoT has the ability to support collaboration in manufacturing and supply chains and is likely to disrupt many currently established processes. It forces companies to make their processes capable of utilizing IoT-enabled devices and attendant data. It has also the potential to significantly improve supply chain efficiency by providing real-time insights into the different manufacturing states of components that are distributed geographically and in time. This paper presents our approach to building a federated IoT-based collaboration platform called NIMBLE, which is currently being developed in a European research project. NIMBLE’s governance model is a federation of platforms for multi-sided B2B trade, with mandatory interoperation facilities between instances of the platform and with optional, addedvalue business functions that can be provided by third parties. Prospective NIMBLE platform-providers can take the open source infrastructure with its core services, bundle it with sectoral, regional or functional added value services and launch the new platform in the federation
We adopted the microservice approach for the realisation of the platform. Microservices offer a number of advantages over traditional solutions: for example, they can be used in more than one application and in various application architectures, thus providing better scalability, better agility and continuous delivery [1]. A single application that is built in microservice manner is a composition of services communicating with lightweight mechanisms, each running in its own process and being managed in a decentralized way. Microservices can use different data storage technologies, different programming languages to define services and can even be managed by different teams [2]. They are often choreographed using simple REST protocols like HTTP request-response with resource APIs and lightweight messaging, e.g. binary protocols, or a lightweight messaging bus. In the IoT, cloud native microservices allows for devices to be interpreted as a set of microservices with the possibility to communicate with each other, or with internal and external microservices, facilitating new levels of customization, security, workload changes, and significantly contributing to the overall system scalability, ease of development and of maintenance, simplifying validation and testing [3]. They can be often seen as the major technology behind public services, e.g. Netflix, eBay, Twitter, Paypal, Bluemix Soundcloud, The Guardian, etc. The NIMBLE microservices provide the core business functions of the platform: registration of users on the platform, publishing machine-readable catalogs for products and services, searching for suitable supply chain partners, negotiation contracts and supply logistics, developing private and secure B2B and M2M (Machine to Machine) information exchange channels to optimise business workflows.
https://edottechnologies.in/The remaining parts of the paper are structured as follows: Section 2 describes our industrial use case, which is about manufacturing wooden multi-storey homes. Section 3 presents the microservice architecture of the NIMBLE platform and discusses the role of its major components. Section 4 introduces the core business microservices. Section 5 puts the microservices in action through two scenarios: (i) data sharing in a supply chain, and (ii) product-driven logistics planning. Section 6 concludes the paper.
The NIMBLE platform is designed to support horizontal B2B collaboration for manufacturing, business and logistics in Europe. With enhanced data management capabilities in place, it helps to further strengthen and deepen collaborations between different entities by providing insights into the relevant data. The presented microservice architecture with its core business services ensures a scalable approach, which can be easily extended with more specific value-added business services from third parties. The possibility of integrating enterprise IoT data via the platform will not only enable the optimization of current business processes, but also allow the development of completely new business models for the future. Dynamic data sharing is governed by the security policies of the sharing entity such that only the specifically relevant items of data are shared with other entities. Documented negotiation mechanisms may help strengthening the trust in supply chain relationships. Enabling dynamic real-time IoTbased multi-stakeholder supply chain processes, such as optimizing production lines use, lies at the heart of the platform presented. In summary, we envision that enhanced supply chain services need to be IoT-driven and enable the entities involved to take more informed and timely decisions. The presented architecture is a step on the way to realize that vision. To show the potential of this IoT-enabled B2B platform, the developed system will be tested at least in four different use cases throughout Europe, one of them has been described in this paper.
