The BMW Group and Microsoft have jointly launched an initiative to enable faster and more cost-effective innovations in the manufacturing industry. This should make the Open Manufacturing Platform (OMP) possible.

Hannover, April 2019 – As part of the Hannover Fair, the BMW Group and Microsoft have announced the launch of OMP. Its role as an open technology platform is to drive the development of smart factory solutions shared by the OMP community in the automotive and manufacturing industries. The aim of the initiative is to accelerate future industrial IoT developments to increase production efficiency.

The OMP is based on the Microsoft Azure Industrial IoT Cloud Platform and is the result of a long-standing technology partnership between the BMW Group and Microsoft. It provides community members with a reference architecture of open source components based on open industry standards and open data models. In addition, the platform standardizes industrial data models to accelerate information analysis. It makes data accessible, which were previously stored mainly in proprietary systems. Community members can quickly create solutions using industrial reference applications without losing control over data and intellectual property. The platform is RAMI4.0-compatible and uses, inter alia, the interoperability standard OPC UA.

With more than 3,000 IoT-capable systems, robots and autonomous transport systems, the BMW Group intends to bring first use cases to the OMP community. One example is the use of the IoT platform for the second generation of transport systems at the BMW plant in Regensburg: Thanks to the platform, the logistics processes were significantly simplified by central coordination of the system. “We have been relying on cloud services since 2016 and are consistently developing new approaches. With the Open Manufacturing Platform as the next step, we want to make our solutions available to other companies and leverage joint potential to sustainably consolidate our strong position in the market,” explains Oliver Zipse, Member of the Executive Board of BMW AG Production.

Caption:

A Smart Transport Robot at BMW's Regensburg plant. (Image: BMW Group)