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The Unified Namespace – to boldly go where we should have gone before

Angelo Hulshout is an experienced independent software craftsman and a member of the Brainport High Tech Software Cluster. He has the ambition to bring the benefits of production agility to the market and set up a new business around that.

Reading time: 5 minutes

Last year, Angelo Hulshout talked a lot about Industry 4.0, but always at quite a high level. In this series, he dives in deeper and takes a closer look under the hood. Starting with the Unified Namespace, a concept building on new technology and the shortcomings of existing technology, which is slowly becoming a carrier for really smart solutions.

In the manufacturing world, we’ve built stacks of software. We have ERP systems that are put on top of MES systems, which in turn are on top of Scada, which itself rests on PLCs. At the bottom, below the PLCs, you find the actual sensors and actuators that run a production line. Such was also the picture I used a few years ago to explain the idea of ERP+ (or ERP in the cloud).

In these stacks, commands go down and information, like statuses and errors, goes up. Between the different layers, there’s a lot of point-to-point communication. A lot of information isn’t even shared at all because it would require too much communication. Also, storing all data in all layers would take up a lot of space – while most layers don’t use it.

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