How We Work

The Open Industry 4.0 Alliance provides a powerful network – for developing and scaling products and services that leverage the Industrial Internet of Things.

The advantage that helps us achieve this? Our members. Among the leading tech talent, we work hand-in-hand to make an incredible impact across all industries facing implementation challenges.

OI4 COMMUNITY

In the picture, you can see the essence of how the OI4 Alliance is organized and how it works.
On the left side, you can see how our Technical Workgroups, Industry Think Tanks, and Project Groups are organized. Digital Twin, Industrial Cybersecurity, Open Edge Computing & Application Management – all together we are an Implementation Community. The workgroups drive and further expand mainly the Open Industry 4.0 Alliance framework. This is needed as the digitalization itself is a long-lasting journey with new aspects identified with each project and customer demand. OI4 members work constantly on use-cases and technologies with relevance for their customer, markets and solutions. Within this picture you see the columns that represent the project groups and industry think tanks. They are mostly time-limited and have clear objectives & key results (OKRs).

On the right side, you can find a general structure of our work. The outer ring shows the people – precisely, the people driving digitalization. DIGITALIZATION is a people driven activity. The green part of the ring represents the OI4 experts from our member companies and our employees. They are organized within Technical Workgroups & Industry Think Tanks, which are detailed on the left side. The purple sections show the important connections to the world outside of the Alliance – a lot of input is also provided by OI4 partners, end customers, and authorities. Inside the ring (or donut), you see the framework with tools, activities, and concepts that support the work of people in the Alliance. Certainly, in each direction, there is a feedback loop – we, as the OI4 Alliance, aim to stay up-to-date and even be at the forefront of digitalization topics.

OI4 Process House

OI4 stakeholders and operators should use the same language. OI4 Process House describes the use cases from business & technical perspectives, from the connectivity layer up to the cross-enterprise view.

OI4 Reference Architecture & Architectural Guardrails

The technical basis of the Open Industry 4.0 Alliance is a flexible & modular approach to implementation.

Decoupled technology layers oriented on PI4.0 RAMI Model.
OI4 Implementation Guidelines explain technology layers and aspects which are the basis for open & interoperable solutions.

Currently, our work groups and think tanks are working on a new release called 'Architectural Guardrails.' They will be published soon. Here are the advantages of the WIP Guardrails: