Compose your i4 Apps thanks to i4 Components
Components that will be used by other i4 Apps when they are executing or when they are trying to execute any of the i4FS resources. It is possible to distinguish three different modules depending on where they are used in the timeline; Design, Use and Run time.
Orchestration Designer
The component brings a powerful web based BPMN designer so the users can visually describe their business processes using the standard BPMN notation.
Data Harmonisation
This component has access to raw data and ensures that data can be integrated using unified and standardised formats or the formats needed by the data recipient.
AI-Analytics designer
The component integrates machine learning into the architecture, enabling the detection and prediction of production process defects.
Application Builder
The component supports developers with a UI aiming to define, design, develop, and compose zApps and manufacturing services.
Security Designer
The component is a comprehensive tool for modelling socio-technical systems, identifying threats, proposing mitigations, and calculating risks in alignment with ISO 27001 and ISO 27005 standards, allowing collaboration among stakeholders for system modeling and risk catalog development.
Prediction and Optimization Designer
The Prediction and Optomisation Designer facilitates the development of process quality solutions in Python by enabling data scientists to discover and reuse open-source resources for innovative algorithms and models, all within the Zero Defects Manufacturing framework.
Secure Installation
The component allows downloading zApps to authorised components. During this process, this component also creates the users, roles and policies required by the zApp.
Secure Communication
The component installs, issues, and revokes digital certificates, which are necessary to securely exchange information between ZDMP assets and external resources.
Secure Authentication and Authorisation
The component stores users and the corresponding authorisation policies, to control that only legitimate communications are allowed using well known protocols, such as OpenID and OAuth 2.0.
Marketplace
The Marketplace primarily targets users from the manufacturing sector. Users can search for existing applications (zApps) based on many characteristics such as category, price, type of payment (demo apps, one-time fee, pay-per-use, monthly or yearly licenses, etc).
Human Collaboration
Human Collaboration component is a central interface for managing location-based data of assets, tools, and products, providing the factory map. The collaboration aspect is performed using multiple media channels (eg Telephone, VoIP, Video Stream).
Storage
This component is the platform data lake allowing persistence and processing the components and data. This data storage includes structured data from relational databases, semi-structured data as XML and JSON files, binary data as images and videos, as well as application components running as microservices.
Portal
The Portal provides a convenient “dashbutton” that serves as an all-in-one solution for seamlessly integrating into the user’s system, granting them effortless access to the software they have purchased.
Application Runtime
The component provides both the capability to orchestrate and host the individual components/apps of the system using containerisation, as well as several core components to enable a baseline of functionality to the hosted components/apps.
Inter-platform Interoperability
This component facilitates the integration of the ZDMP platform with external platforms. It enables the selling and purchasing of services and components between platforms, and establishes connections with other instances of ZDMP. Additionally, it allows linking data sources from different platforms and ensures secure access levels across the integrated platforms.
Monitoring and Alerting
The component collects data from machines, infrastructure, and i4 Apps via the message bus and presents it in a web-based UI. The component also sends alerts to users and other i4 components.
Autonomous Computing
The component enables the decentralisation and automation of decisions by autonomously controlling processes values and resources, be it zApps, i4 components or computational resources, as well as communicating and cooperating with other components.
AI Analytics Runtime
In the production phase, through the AI-Analytic Runtime component, i4 users can run these machine learning models on real-time process data and get also in real-time notifications and alerts of some uncommon behavior that could appear, and, in the meantime, i4 apps can adjust the production parameters in order to avoid defects.
Service and Message Bus
The Service and Message Bus, provides a standardised communication interface to exchange messages, events, and data.
Prediction and Optimisation Runtime
The component supports these features for different aspects of manufacturing process, both during the preparation and the production stage. Optimisation largely relies on numerical methods to reduce changeover times, eliminate related errors, or keep process quality within a certain range. Additionally, predictor components rely in machine learning methods that provide prognostic models that predict future trends of the process quality to support decision making during operation.
Product Assurance Runtime
The component focuses on ensuring product quality through data obtained in the manufacturing process and quality inspections. It consists of two tasks: Product Quality Prediction and Product Quality Supervision, both utilizing AI and Big Data techniques. This documentation specifically covers the Quality Prediction Designer, which allows the design and training of machine learning models for predicting product quality. The component integrates machine learning libraries and analytical tools to prepare and select trained models.
Process Assurance Runtime
The component is a user application for monitoring and analyzing the manufacturing process. It allows users to manage prediction, optimization, KPIs, and alarms. Alarms can detect potential failures, while notifications can be configured based on specific criteria. The PA Run-time suggests preventive actions based on sufficient data and utilizes Prediction and Optimization Run-time components for data processing. It interacts with other components in the ZDMP platform, including Monitoring and Alerting and AI Analytics Run-time.
Data Acquisition
As a prerequisite for data access, exchange, and analytics within i4 Platform, the Data Acquisition component implements a framework for the handling of data from IoT sensors and other physical sources.
Distributed Computing
The component executes the computing tasks (eg API calls to Docker setups to change the amount of resources used) and distributes the intensive computing work tasks through a cluster, composed by a group of work nodes.
Digital Twin
The component is a digital representation of the current state of a manufacturing process and the characterisation and modelling of product features which provides data objects that describe different aspects of the physical and logical parts of a manufacturing process.
Non-Destructive Inspection
The component is used to inspect products for detecting defects, by analysing in-line sensors data: depending on application, images, scalar data, or data streams are elaborated. This powerful set of functionalities is intended to support zApp designers to build applications monitoring product quality.
Additional resources
Training Academy
Software Documentation
Read our easy to follow documentation to learn how to use the i4 Components.