An Open-source Toolkit for Retrofit Industry 4.0 Sensing and Monitoring Applications

The last several years have witnessed a paradigm shift in industry that has now ushered in the fourth industrial revolution era also referred to as Industry 4.0. This new technology promises major improvements in the industrial processes by connecting local and global networks for information exchange amongst smart machinery while integrating possibly all stages of the value chain. However, small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) still have many concerns about Industry 4.0 and about its potential benefits. This is generally as a result of high investment and conversion costs. An evaluation platform to test Industry 4.0 applications for enabling engineers and managers in identifying the potential benefits before making expensive decisions is attractive. With this aim, the authors present an extensible and customizable open source toolkit for the evaluation of Industry 4.0 applications by providing a complete set of capabilities from sensing of data at the shop floor to monitoring at the upper level of the enterprise.