Containerized Edge Architecture for Centralized Industry 4.0 Fleet Management

Industry 4.0 paradigm has merged OT and IT domains, increasing the requirements to capture, storage, visualize and analyze industrial data. Furthermore, companies monitoring and exploiting data from several industrial assets have to deploy software at several edge devices, creating a fleet of devices. Managing this fleet of devices and the software they run is a burdening task that requires IT tools to be feasible to perform with limited human and economic resources. This paper proposes an IIOT fleet management architecture based on micro-services and containerized edge devices to target this scenario where a company monitors and exploits data from several distributed industrial assets. Each edge device is managed from a centralized Open Balena server. This server controls and monitors the software distributed to edge devices connected to industrial assets. The edge devices run containerized micro-services to capture, storage, analyze and visualize data. These data are sent to the server, where microservices provide a general view and analyze data from all the monitored assets. The architecture has been successfully validated capturing real time data from a Raspberry Pi fleet.