Open-source Software for Developing Appropriate Smart Manufacturing Technology for Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs)

Abstract

Manufacturing innovation promoted by the Fourth Industrial Revolution presents various technologies and policies for implementing future smart factories based on advances in information and communication technology (ICT). However, despite recent advances in smart manufacturing technologies, several difficulties in migrating conventional manufacturing to smart factories remain, particularly in small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). Among the recently emerging technologies, ICT-related technologies have been developed and utilized as open-source software (OSS) to accelerate their development through collective intelligence and community growth. In this study, to facilitate the identification of appropriate smart manufacturing solutions for personnel in SMEs with insufficient prior experience and knowledge using OSS, several reference architectures (RAs) are investigated to define a small RA that can be referenced to configure the mandatory functions during development as technical requirements. Subsequently, user-oriented requirements are summarized to determine the enabling OSS by considering the conditions of SMEs for the functional components in developing appropriate smart manufacturing technologies to form Internet of Things edge computing, and a recommendation for enabling OSS that guides the development of SMEs is proposed. In the evaluation, a small edge and gateway demonstration is performed using two single-board computers equipped with Raspberry Pi, where some of the recommended enabling OSS of Message Queuing Telemetry Transport via Wi-Fi, MySQL, Node-RED, and Python are used. Finally, the feasibility of the proposed approach is confirmed by evaluating the demonstration.