The Data-driven Factory

Global competition in the manufacturing industry is characterized by ever shorter product life cycles, increasing complexity and a turbulent environment. High product quality, continuously improved processes as well as changeable organizational structures constitute central success factors for manufacturing companies. With the rise of the internet of things and Industrie 4.0, the increasing use of cyber-physical systems as well as the digitalization of manufacturing operations lead to massive amounts of heterogeneous industrial data across the product life cycle. In order to leverage these big industrial data for competitive advantages, we present the concept of the data-driven factory. The data-driven factory enables agile, learning and human-centric manufacturing and makes use of a novel IT architecture, the Stuttgart IT Architecture for Manufacturing (SITAM), overcoming the insufficiencies of the traditional information pyramid of manufacturing. We introduce the SITAM architecture and discuss its conceptual components with respect to service-oriented integration, advanced analytics and mobile information provisioning in manufacturing. Moreover, for evaluation purposes, we present a prototypical implementation of the SITAM architecture as well as a real-world application scenario from the automotive industry to demonstrate the benefits of the data-driven factory.