44039Software Defined Automation Platform (SDAP) - revisedClosedStudyInnovate UKThe Internet of Things (IoT) is the inter-networking of physical devices, vehicles, buildings, and other information sources embedded with electronics, software sensors, actuators and network connectivity which enable these objects to collect and exchange data. Together with the intelligent services to allow them to process information of the physical and the virtual world and react, this forms one of the new technological phenomena driving the current digital revolution. A major need is to have a robust, real time solution for time critical industrial monitoring and control applications. This follows the need to provide individual devices with the ability to operate remotely controlling vital processes, and collate data from many devices feeding big data analytics for predictive decision making. This is the Industrial IoT (IIoT). For several reasons, currently installed (industrial) control systems are predominantly closed and proprietary. This contrasts to the open, interoperable network of instrumentation devices below them and the Information Technology (IT) systems above in the typical automation hierarchy. Closed, proprietary systems are expensive to upgrade and maintain, and challenging when trying to insert new technology, especially from third parties. (Source: The Open Process Automation(tm) Business Guide). By providing software defined solutions running on commodity hardware, capable of remote updates to an entire estate, these issues are addressed offering costs savings and long-term confidence of supply. This project will deliver: •A flexible open solution supporting virtualized workloads for time-critical applications •A simplified "Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition" (SCADA) integration. •Support a range of time-critical use cases including closed loop control, industrial data inference, and virtualized PLC applications •Extensible containerized provisioning enabling a deployed system to evolve as additional applications are deployed •A solution that can use the latest Intel and ARM ultra-low power System-On-a Chip (SOC) processors Our objective is an implementation independent of silicon, operating system, hardware and application provider; the solution will run stand alone on highly embedded devices or be delivered in conjunction with other Edge based systems. The initial reference implementations are an extension to the Linux Foundation's EdgeX open IoT Edge Platform, but ultimately the solution could provide time-critical extensions to other Edge Platforms e.g. AWS Greengrass EdgeX is a vendor-neutral open source project building a common open framework for Industrial IoT (IIoT), edge computing. EdgeX is seeing wide scale adoption and broad industry support, it provides an excellent reference platform on which the output of this project can be validated.