The Dutch 2014 Smart Industry Action Agenda formulates an overall plan in order to meet the demands of smart industry. Action line 3, Action 7, of that agenda calls for creating a smart industry R&D agenda. This agenda encompasses many disciplines, from engineering to humanities and social sciences, all for the good of smart industry. As part of this R&D agenda, several ICT challenges within smart industry have been formulated. A number of these stand out:
- Secure and reliable communication, identification and availability are key needs to enable smart industry. With the growing number of parties involved in the production chain, one cannot simply switch off systems (or even system-of-systems) for maintenance, software updates, etc. Moreover the systems will become more vulnerable for attacks from outside. The size and complexity of these man-made systems is huge and increasing by the day (Action 14).
- Big data is rapidly becoming pervasive in smart industry, leading to the demand for solutions to deal with big data and to create new services and businesses. These solutions must be based on secure storage and sharing of data beyond the concept of trusted third parties, as the constellation of involved parties in smart industries consists of complex and variable interactions of services, components, and data. Data will need to be shared in order for business to be shared (Actions 12 and 13).
This project aligns the key R&I community in the Netherlands in the field of ICT for smart industry, in order to be better prepared for the future. Through a series of workshops, input from European policy documents and funding program descriptions, and interactions with foreign experts we intend to strengthen the Dutch R&I position in this field working towards a tailored R&I agenda for ICT in smart industry.
- Boudewijn Haverkort, University of Twente
- Koen Langendoen, TU Delft
- Gerard Beenker, Johan Lukkien, TU Eindhoven