OSIE

«Open Source Industrial Edge»

OSIE (Open Source Industrial Edge) will deliver "Industrial Edge as a Service" (IEaaS), a disruptive cloud service which transforms industrial automation into a branch of the open source software and hardware ecosystems. OSIE will cut prices by an order of magnitude, eliminate interoperability blockers, accelerate data-driven business and provide flexibility for Industry 4.0. It will support real-time orchestration and deterministic, end-to-end communication at the edge using generic hardware.

Project Summary

OSIE

The OSIE project aims to extend the idea of free (open source) cloud computing and edge computing to the field of industrial automation and robotics with a view to applications in Industry 4.0. This is what we call "Free Industrial Edge Computing" or Open Source Industrial Edge Computing.

Innovation in the industrial automation market is currently slowed down by abnormally high prices, low interoperability and incompatibility between closed systems dominated by incumbent suppliers in Europe, Japan and the United States.  This state of the market creates ideal conditions for the emergence of new players. Chinese competitors are already storming the market with equivalent products at half the price, just as Huawei did 20 years ago with telecommunications equipment. The situation is also ideal for the European free software industry to offer a radical, sustainable and profitable alternative based on the motto: "software eats the world".

It is this alternative that OSIE (Open Source Industrial Edge Computing) will try to build with the Eurostars project.

Idea

The idea is to provide as quickly as possible an innovative solution based on existing open source technologies:

  • the "SlapOS" Edge Computing technology, invented by Nexedi 10 years ago;
  • industrial PCs under free licence designed by Olimex (Bulgaria);
  • the Linux kernel extensions for deterministic real time invented by Linutronix (Germany) ;
  • already existing free software for industrial automation (ProviewR, open62541) and robotics (ROS2).

The three industrial partners in the project (Nexedi, Olimex and Linutronix) are joined by the Fraunhofer Fokus Research Institute (Berlin), a member of the Edge Computing Consortium Europe (ECCE) and a specialist in the evaluation of low-latency networks typical of industrial automation.

OSIE will take the form of a cloud service that has led to several technological breakthroughs in the field of industrial automation and robotics:

  • by replacing hardware by software;
  • by replacing proprietary systems with open source systems;
  • by replacing proprietary protocols with open standards;
  • by removing licensing costs which are barriers to interoperability;
  • automating all system management tasks through devops;
  • promoting a data-based business model, including AI.

We call this type of cloud service the "Industrial Edge as a Service" (IEaaS).

Latest News

Publications

Source Code

The OSIE source code can be found on the following repositories

Resources

This project has been selected to receive funding by Eureka-Eurostars:

funded by Eureka-Eurostars