Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Retrofitting Industrial Machines with WebAssembly on the Edge

2022; Springer Science+Business Media; Linguagem: Inglês

10.1007/978-3-031-20891-1_18

1611-3349

Otoya Nakakaze, István Koren, Florian Brillowski, Ralf Klamma,

Additive Manufacturing and 3D Printing Technologies

Tapping into previously inaccessible data sources promises new potential for value creation in the manufacturing industry. However, asset-heavy shopfloors, long machine replace cycles, and equipment heterogeneity demand major investments to achieve smart manufacturing, which small businesses struggle with. Retrofitting is a sustainable means of equipping aged machines with low-cost sensors and microcontrollers to read and forward machine data. In this paper, we present a concept and a prototype to retrofit industrial scenarios using lightweight web technologies on the edge. We propose using WebAssembly as a new bytecode standard that runs on browsers and bare-metal hardware alike, thus providing a uniform development environment from cloud to edge. We confirm its applicability by achieving near-native performance together with modularity known from container-based service architectures. Our prototype is evaluated with a real industrial robot within a showcase factory, including measurements of data exchange with a state-of-the-art data lake setup. We are convinced that our groundwork paves the way to an easier-to-implement and more sustainable Industry 4.0.