Enabling Effective Data Collection for Industry 4.0: Technical Solution for Collecting and Transferring Shop Floor Data

Abstract

The manufacturing industry is moving towards Industry 4.0, this requires that the right information is available to reach the full potential of the various Industry 4.0 technologies such as Digital Twin, Cloud computing, advanced analytics, Artificial Intelligence, Internet of Things, and Machine Learning. To obtain the right infor mation, a system for gathering and transferring data in real time is required. To be able to make this connection, Edge device is usually used. Edge devices are devices that can collect data in production. The purpose of this thesis is to find and evaluate suitable technical solutions to collect and transfer data. The work is carried out in three steps, identifying the data collection challenges, a literature study to find technical solutions, and evaluating technical solutions. The findings show that there are technical solutions on the market to collect and transfer the data that the case company request. Further research should ensure that the technical solutions work by doing tests in a lab environment or by trying to implement them on a workstation.