Volkswagen is building its digital production platform
Following its cooperation with Microsoft on the automotive cloud, the Volkswagen Group has now announced its collaboration with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to jointly build the “Volkswagen Industrial Cloud”. With the VW Industrial Cloud, all 122 factories will be networked and the data of all machines, plants and systems will be merged. The process is expected to take five years. However, the IT landscape at the production level is still quite different in some parts of the plants. This does not make it easy to standardize data and combine it across the board. The Volkswagen Industrial Cloud is intended to enable all key figures to be standardized.
Siemens will also become an integration partner of the VW Industrial Cloud. Applications and apps for the VW plants will be made available via its Internet of Things system “MindSphere”. These include predictive maintenance and industrial edge solutions. Here, production data is processed and analyzed directly from end devices and machines before being combined in the industrial cloud. The Industrial Cloud will launch at the end of 2019 with 140 projects, e.g. a service for localizing goods transports inside and outside the factory. Last November, Volkswagen announced investments of 44 billion euros for digitalization, autonomous driving and e-mobility over the next five years. From 2020, more than 5 million fully networked VW brand cars are to be launched on the market each year.
Margot Schwöbel, Market Intelligence Expert
Sources:
- Computerwoche 01.04.2019
- heise news 29.03.2019
