Enhancing the Performance of Industry 4.0 Scenarios via Serverless Processing at the Edge

Industry 4.0 aims to revolutionize and digitize the manufacturing sector by enabling and facilitating interoperability, solution agility, flexible (re)configuration of production chain(s) while, at the same time, reducing costs by exploiting real time data. These capabilities require to link the plant floor with data flows from/to the enterprise borders and include as core enabling technologies the Internet of Things (IoT), cloud, and edge computing key to move and execute parts of the business logic. The new capabilities might be leveraged in an innovative way, especially in the plant floor to dynamically change the monitoring/control logic of the smart machinery. In our reference scenario, the data flows originating from the plant floor can be processed and filtered locally, creating the basis for a selective Quality of Service (QoS) mechanism allowing for the implementation of reactive services, such as predictive maintenance. To that end, we propose an innovative serverless edge processing solution used for monitoring geo-distributed industrial plants. The proposal is validated in realistic settings, under different operational regimes, exhibiting acceptable performance trends under realistic periodic and variable traffic scenarios.