Following its formation at the Hannover Messe in spring 2019, the Open Industry 4.0 Alliance is now represented at SPS for the first time with its own joint stand. "We started with the concept, and now we have the first architectures to prove it," says Nils Herzberg(SAP), Spokesman of the Board of the Open Industry 4.0 Alliance. Hans-Jürgen Hilscher, CEO and Chief Technology Officer of the Open Industry 4.0 Alliance and Managing Director of Hilscher, explains: "We are using a multi-vendor wall to show how we solve the typical problem of a heterogeneous industrial plant. Devices from eleven providers with different communication standards and different data semantics are brought together on a common platform." In the example installation, the sensors and actuators - for example for flow, vibration and position measurement and a motion controller - from nine different members are used. These send their data to an edge computing platform and the apps running on it. Using the associated device description files, they generate telemetry and metadata in standardized OPC UA format and publish it on a shared MQTT measurement bus. The 'Streamsheet' app, for example, uses this to obtain information and evaluates it at runtime. The data is forwarded in parallel; the user now has a complete overview on a shared dashboard in the Operator Cloud. The master asset data from all devices is reported to SAP's Asset Intelligence Network application in Cloud Central to orchestrate all data.

The Alliance members are convinced that digital transformation requires one language for all. The association is therefore aiming for up to 80% of the machines in a smart factory to be able to communicate with each other. The technological foundation is an open architecture based on RAMI 4.0, which is based on the four building blocks Device Connectivity, Edge, Operator Cloud and Cloud Central as well as a corresponding range of services. One of the key features of the solution is Asset Automatic Onboarding through all four architectural layers using open standard interfaces based on the Industry 4.0 management shell.

The Alliance's main objective is to provide the operator or end customer with a scalable overall solution. This is based on the interoperability framework of the Open Industry 4.0 Alliance. The organization already has over 125 products and services that have been transformed by members in accordance with the Alliance guidelines. The Alliance was founded in April 2019 by nine companies. The association behind the Alliance was founded in October and now includes 43 companies.