Resilience 4.0 in beer production line: IoT, Edge Computing, Fog Computing, and Cloud

The purpose of this research is to analyze the impact of Industry 4.0 (I4.0) on the Resilience of a beverage production line, particularly a beer one. As this characteristic is fundamental in any field, it must be addressed also in the field of Industry 4.0. The new technologies made available by the Fourth Industrial Revolution can bring huge benefits on the production plants on different aspects, like: predictive and prescriptive maintenance, increased OEE, productivity, efficiency, and effectiveness; better quality of output and customer satisfaction. In this paper, the chosen 4.0 technologies are IoT, Edge Computing, Fog Computing, and Cloud. This choice has been made to follow on of the pillars of Industry 4.0: starting small. This research focuses on field level, with IoT, and the management of the collected data by the integration of Edge Computing and Fog Computing, before sending the final data to Cloud. The methodology used to write this paper is divided into clear steps, logically connected to each other. The first activity has been a deep analysis and study of the existing literature, to understand the features of each technology and their strengths and weaknesses. Moreover, it has also been searched for how to integrate these technologies and their impact on the Resilience of systems embedded with them. After this deep literature review, the next phase was to evaluate the requirements and needs of the beer production line, to establish how the studied technologies can bring value. Finally, the focus on Resilience has been set. The key findings of this research are the characteristics of the analyzed technologies and the impact on Resilience. The value of this innovative paper is the deep study of the field technologies and the design of a framework to bring Resilience 4.0 into production companies, especially to beer production lines.