An autonomous edge box system architecture for Industrial IoT applications

Digitalization has been developing in manufacturing for decades. Many concepts and technologies related to digitalization have been proposed and have brought significant benefits to enterprises. The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) is an important means to realize digital manufacturing. However, there are many barriers when integrating and implementing digitalization for industrial companies, especially for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). These barriers mainly include high cost sensitivity, difficulty in system installation and deployment, lacking of unified methods and platforms, and threats to data and network security. Therefore, a lightweight IIoT architecture is proposed in this paper to support SMEs to overcome the barriers and obtain the practical values brought by IIoT with a lower cost and effort. Finally, a case study has been conducted to validate the proposed approach.