Eclipse Arrowhead progress and future directions
Eclipse Arrowhead progress and future directions
In a recent interview with Swedish industry publication Elektronik tidningen, Professor Delsing, co-ordinator for the Eclipse Arrowhead project, discussed the progress the project has made so far as it heads into 2021.
Delsing reinforced the importance of the project in confronting the challenges that face society as a whole, such as reducing the environmental impact of production through more efficient use of materials and energy. The overarching goal of the project is to reduce engineering cost; the costs associated with developing, implementing and testing new industrial systems. To do this, the project focuses on solving problems of interoperability that prohibit more effective collaboration on all levels - from devices exchanging information to important industrial partners and researchers being able to collaborate efficiently in real time.
A telling example of the costs of poor or non-existent interoperability in industrial settings is Volvo’s project to move an online industrial drill from one workstation to another only 15 meters away. Systems at Volvo had been developed separately over a long period of time. This created a series of monolithic system structures operating in their own self-contained environment and specialising in one specific area. As a consequence, it was unclear which systems were able to interact with one another and how this would affect the operation as a whole. The result was that the project cost over 1 Million SEK due to Volvo needing to retest its entire automation system.
By providing an open source framework and tools that allow the implementation of a Service Oriented Architecture, the Eclipse Arrowhead project creates opportunities for manufacturers to integrate existing legacy systems with new more dynamic systems that are not dependent on a single vendor. This allows the capacity of existing systems to continue to be used at the same time as the overall production system can be enhanced with the addition of easily integrated independent devices and services that allow industrial processes to be more closely monitored and controlled as well as automated to a much greater degree.
As the project continues, challenges that will be addressed include continuing to define and develop tools, understanding how to configure specific individual systems and exploring in more depth the possibilities for automatically generating code from system definitions to allow even greater degrees of automation.
Read the full interview here (in Swedish): https://etn.se/index.php/67466?via=n
In a recent interview with Swedish industry publication Elektronik tidningen, Professor Delsing, co-ordinator for the Eclipse Arrowhead project, discussed the progress the project has made so far as it heads into 2021.
Delsing reinforced the importance of the project in confronting the challenges that face society as a whole, such as reducing the environmental impact of production through more efficient use of materials and energy. The overarching goal of the project is to reduce engineering cost; the costs associated with developing, implementing and testing new industrial systems. To do this, the project focuses on solving problems of interoperability that prohibit more effective collaboration on all levels - from devices exchanging information to important industrial partners and researchers being able to collaborate efficiently in real time.
A telling example of the costs of poor or non-existent interoperability in industrial settings is Volvo’s project to move an online industrial drill from one workstation to another only 15 meters away. Systems at Volvo had been developed separately over a long period of time. This created a series of monolithic system structures operating in their own self-contained environment and specialising in one specific area. As a consequence, it was unclear which systems were able to interact with one another and how this would affect the operation as a whole. The result was that the project cost over 1 Million SEK due to Volvo needing to retest its entire automation system.
By providing an open source framework and tools that allow the implementation of a Service Oriented Architecture, the Eclipse Arrowhead project creates opportunities for manufacturers to integrate existing legacy systems with new more dynamic systems that are not dependent on a single vendor. This allows the capacity of existing systems to continue to be used at the same time as the overall production system can be enhanced with the addition of easily integrated independent devices and services that allow industrial processes to be more closely monitored and controlled as well as automated to a much greater degree.
As the project continues, challenges that will be addressed include continuing to define and develop tools, understanding how to configure specific individual systems and exploring in more depth the possibilities for automatically generating code from system definitions to allow even greater degrees of automation.
Read the full interview here (in Swedish): https://etn.se/index.php/67466?via=n