Hitachi has announced that along with Mitsubishi Electric and Intel (Japan), it proposed and received approval for the Factory Automation Platform as a Service (FA PaaS) Testbed in the field of next-generation factories at the Industrial Internet Consortium.
The goal of the testbed is to test open IoT platforms that seamlessly integrate Factory Automation (FA) in the front lines of manufacturing and information technologies that support management and operation. Hitachi will incorporate the results of these tests into the IoT platform “Lumada”, and create new solutions along with customers and partners.
According to Hitachi, the need for an IoT testbed has been driven by growing demand for more rapid product development and market introduction, and quality improvements and shorter lead times, through the introduction of new technologies and collaborations between companies. This in turn has led to a growing expectation for data-driven optimisation, which has given rise to a need for secure connections between a variety of devices in the FA environment and cutting-edge IT services, as well as accelerated development of applications in the field of next-generation factories.
Hitachi says the advantage of the IoT platform tested in its testbed is that it can accelerate application development for next-generation factories by making available the integrated environment between the FA and service platform layers.