Virtual Fort Knox - Federative, secure and cloud-based platform for manufacturing

In future the engineer and IT world will grow together. Networking and linking of information from the physical production and the digital world enable an optimization in manufacturing. Within the research project Virtual Fort Knox at the Fraunhofer IPA in Germany, a federative, secure and cloud-based platform for distributed service-oriented applications in plant operation is developed. The challenge is to establish a platform for the manufacturing to improve data processing and intelligent, cooperative networking. Data and information have to be saved, read and used on a flexible, simple and scalable way. This paper presents our research work in developing the platform by the description of the transformation process to the networked factory. The main aspects are consistent, integrated security across all components, community cloud for IT-decentralization respectively data, cooperation and competence distribution.