In the 'Find' project - 'Future Industrial Network Architecture' - representatives from industry and science have joined forces to develop the foundations for the future of the industrial Internet based on the latest network technologies from the fields of industrial automation, the Internet and 5G mobile communications. In addition to DFKI as the overall coordinator, the consortium includes Bosch, Festo, the Institute for Industrial Information Technology (inIT) at the Ostwestfalen-Lippe University of Applied Sciences in Lemgo, HMS, Bosch Rexroth, rt-solutions.de, Siemens, the Technical University of Dresden and the University of Passau. The consortium is coordinated by Professor Hans D. Schotten, scientific director at DFKI and head of the Intelligent Networks research department. 'Find' is funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) with around 4.3 million euros over a period of three years.

The aim of the 'Find' project is to develop an overall architecture for the future Industrial Internet and, in particular, a network control system that can largely automatically map and monitor the requirements of industrial applications to the various resources and networking options. Manual intervention in the configuration of a network and during operation should be reduced to a minimum. The aim is also to automatically provide defined service qualities across different networking technologies on an end-to-end basis. In this way, complex, distributed control architectures can be implemented flexibly and efficiently, whereby the underlying complexity is largely abstracted from the application developer and factory operator. Failures of individual resources, such as control hardware, can be automatically compensated for in order to reduce unnecessary downtimes of systems or machines and thus increase the effectiveness of the entire production process. In addition to future systems and those currently under development, such as Time-Sensitive Networking (TSN) or 5G, it should also be possible to easily integrate the numerous existing industrial communication technologies and devices in order to enable seamless migration.