Improved industrial productivity while reducing environmental impact can be achieved with automation and digitalization solutions. Current cost of automation engineering prohibits a wider automation in our society. In addition current production productivity is not increasing despite the introduction of more IoT technology to the existing automation which primarily is based on legacy technology. This is often referred to the productivity paradox, see figure below.
A major reason therefore is the low flexibility offered by legacy automation technology in combination with increasingly very high cost for integration of legacy and new Internet (e.g. IoT, BigData, AI, System of System) technology. Still automation is a key approach to improve industrial productivity while also reducing environmental impact and supporting sustainability.
The Arrowhead Tools project set forth to reduce the automation solution engineering cost by 20-50%. The approach is based on microservice architecture and associated implementation methodology, engineering tools and integration platform. This is realized as the Eclipse Arrowhead microservice architecture and associated implementation platform. The Eclipse Arrowhead technology is provided as open source under the umbrella of Eclipse foundation. Thus ensuring a wide availability and long term governance with a well established IP governance supported by the Eclipse foundation.
The Eclipse Arrowhead technology have been validated and verified in more than 20 industrial use cases representing all phases of standardized (IEC 81346) automation solution engineering procedure. The verification and validation results shows engineering cost and time reduction by 30-95% compared to current industrial state of the art.
One concrete examples of concrete technology uptake by non-Arrowhead Tools partner is the Thingwave company who uses the Eclispe Arrowhead framework in their products. This can be seen in multiple videos. A testimony letter from Thingwave is attached.
Three major actions has been important for the current impact and industrial uptake of the project results.
- Making core architecture and implementation platform open source under Eclipse ECL2 license with Eclipse IP checking mechanisms applied for every code release. Current release is v4.4.1
- Forming of the Eclipse Arrowhead commercial ecosystem, currently having 15+ players involved. A kick-off webinar has been executed March 30, with more than 100 attendees
- First exploitation based on Arrowhead Tools use case results. Eclipse Arrowhead Technology already in first early commercial exploitation in e.g. semiconductor production (Infineon), automative production (Volvo), building production (Lindbäcksbygg, Podcomp), mining (Boliden), logistics (DAC). A testimony letter from DAC is attached.
