Abstract
One of the goals of Industry 4.0 is to achieve enhanced connectivity in manufacturing environments. Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) applications enable this paradigm, opening new possibilities for data collection and subsequent data processing. In this view, the Smart Mini Factory laboratory for Industry 4.0 of the Free University of Bolzano acts as a Learning Factory (LF), aiming at spreading knowledge and consciousness about Industry 4.0 technologies among students and industrial practitioners. In this work, the authors propose a retrofitting process in which a consolidated technology such as Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) is used to interconnect previously isolated workstations, transforming them into IIoT-ready entities of a cyber-physical production system (CPPS). The retrofitting process foresees the physical equipment of legacy workstations with RFID readers to identify different status of assembly operations as well as the design and implementation of a communication architecture to efficiently connect the workstations to a higher level and secure IoT platform. Thereby accurately registered data such as value adding times, idle times, and others can be used for monitoring reason and to identify
improvements to the setup of the assembly line and the assembly process. The developed application is designed for being used within the assembly line of the LF. This work finally illustrates how the application is integrated in the didactic concept with the aim to learn and practice how to collect, process, and exploit digital data from production.