With EC4P, Audi is delivering smart manufacturing by bringing software-defined factory automation to the shop floor and bridging the gap between IT and OT. The initiative includes close partnership between key technology partners including Broadcom, Cisco and Siemens.
“The use of virtual programmable logic controllers in the body shop is an important productivity leap in our 360factory strategy for efficient and data-driven manufacturing,” said Audi Board Member for Production
“The collaboration between Audi and Broadcom is core to building a manufacturing future that is more efficient, cost-effective and secure,” said
Transforming IT-based Factory Automation with a Private
Audi deployed
- Virtual Worker Stations (Virtual Desktops): Instead of maintaining physical industrial PCs for running thousands of “worker stations” across the factory, these can now be run as virtual machines (VM) on
VMware Cloud Foundation outside of the actual plant. Software and operating system updates can be done as a parallel operation instead of forcing them into the short shift changeover times. If a worker station VM has issues, it can quickly be replaced remotely.
- Virtual Programmable Logic Controllers (vPLCs): Virtual Programmable Logic Controllers (vPLCs) are used to control robots that manufacture different parts of the cars. A vPLC workload can be installed as a VM or even container and be managed similarly to IT-based cloud infrastructure. Configuration updates, security patches and feature updates can be made from Audi’s private cloud.
Building on EC4P, upcoming use cases may include AI-driven production, data analytics and computer vision applications for Audi. With
- Infrastructure standardization through one private cloud platform for all applications on the shop floor.
- Faster updates and deployments through improved efficiency with faster application deployment, automated updates and maintenance.
- Better agility and scalability through cloud infrastructure that makes it easier and faster to reconfigure a production line to accommodate a product mix change, and scale compute and storage infrastructure easily and independently.
- Reduced costs through a smaller hardware footprint, less hardware maintenance, and centralized software and operating system updates.
- Lower environmental impact through a smaller hardware footprint that generates less heat, consumes less power, and results in less e-waste.
- Enhanced security and resilience through automated and centralized patching at scale and use of immutable snapshots in the event of an attack or breach enable fast roll back to the last known good state, minimizing interruption to the production line.
- Less downtime through intelligent workload and network telemetry can proactively flag, diagnose and remediate issues and automated updates during planned maintenance windows.
“As Audi seeks to take factory automation to the next level and benefit from a scalable infrastructure at its factories worldwide,
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Source: Broadcom Inc.