Design Guidelines for Big Data Gathering in Industry 4.0 Environments

Smart factory management is going through a remarkable change, in terms of quality and diversity of services provided to customers. The companies that produce manufacturing machines now can follow the products throughout the production chain, from the project to the deployment in real scenarios. Industry 4.0 is pushing this trend forward, demanding for servitization of products and machines, mainly for the manufacturing sector where human and production machine are in strict collaboration. The data produced by the machines must be processed quickly to allow the implementation of reactive services such as predictive maintenance and remote control, always taking care of the safety of nearby people. This paper proposes a multilayer architecture to tackle the main issues in monitoring legacy manufacturing machines and to provide general guidelines to solve them. We derived some guidelines from a real Industry 4.0 transition experiment performed together with the company technical departments to accomplish an efficient system for monitoring and servitization of manufacturing machines, with a scalable platform that confirms its usefulness in many production facilities with different needs.