The stuttgart IT architecture for manufacturing an architecture for the data-driven factory

Abstract

The global conditions for manufacturing are rapidly changing towards shorter product life cycles, more complexity and more turbulence. The manufacturing industry must meet the demands of this shifting environment and the increased global competition by ensuring high product quality, continuous improvement of processes and increasingly flexible organization. Technological developments towards smart manufacturing create big industrial data which needs to be leveraged for competitive advantages. We present a novel IT architecture for data-driven manufacturing, the Stuttgart IT Architecture for Manufacturing (SITAM). It addresses the weaknesses of traditional manufacturing IT by providing IT systems integration, holistic data analytics and mobile information provisioning. The SITAM surpasses competing reference architectures for smart manufacturing because it has a strong focus on analytics and mobile integration of human workers into the smart production environment and because it includes concrete recommendations for technologies to implement it, thus filling a granularity gap between conceptual and case-based architectures. To illustrate the benefits of the SITAM’s prototypical implementation, we present an application scenario for value-added services in the automotive industry.