Towards personalised manufacturing with industry 4.0: Asset brokering in real time

Industry 4.0 introduces many new technologies to the manufacturing process that allows digitisation of data. In the past, most products were mass produced to cut down on unnecessary costs, but slowly a demand increased for personalised items. With Industry 4.0 in the manufacturing line, customisation can be easily achieved due to the flexibility that is incorporated into the machines of today. One of the issues that exists when sharing data is there is no platform to host an organisations’ assets, and to have other organisations view and purchase them. This paper proposes an asset brokering system to manage information published by organisations that enables real-time transaction of asset values. This system also features authentication on both ends to ensure that the correct data provider and data consumer is connected to each other. A prototype has been developed and deployed to a cloud environment that showcases a selected use case that makes use of the developed Asset Brokering system for personalised manufacturing.