Hi,
I hope my reply somehow works as I list the original mail from Benjamin.
First of all I really like the idea for the testbed. Please find here some comments where I see shortcommings that we should address somehow:
Industrie 4.0 is a lot about distributed/dezentralized control. That means that seeral/many control devices are interacting to perform the taks required for the facility. Somethimes this interaction can be handled by the gateway devices but most of the time direct interaction that changes over time is reqired. The main reason is that the any meditator (gateway device or broker) introduces to much overhead and latency. For that brokerless protocols are reuqired and should be showcased in the testbed.
Therefore I would suggest to split up the boiler use case in at least 3 to 4 controller devcies. These devices should directly interact with each other to perform the control task fo the boiler example (i.e., control the steam output and the level of the boiler) and report the values to the higher level systems.
Sofar the testbed is about Data Aquisition and analytics. In I4.0 also the other direction would be interesting which is often called Supervisary Control. I think at some point we should address this as well. E.g., based on the analytics or some human input change setupoints or parameters of the control algorithms.
Regarding the visualisation of the Boiler use case it would make sense to introduce a SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data Aquisition) Element. This can be handled by Eclipse Neo SCADA. An Eclipse Neo SCADA Master could run in the Gateway device providing then operater HMIs for the boiler.
I hope this helps.
Alois
