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Facility refers to assessing the current infrastructure limitations and operational constraints of a manufacturing facility to adopt edge computing.
The facility edge capability comes with four evaluation criteria as the following figure shows.
Environment focuses on a facility space constraint, power limitations, and ruggedness requirements for deploying and managing the edge, including the functional edge, far edge, and near edge.
Assets are within the category of functional edge, they are reviewed and evaluated for their ability to connect and qualitatively communicate data within the multicloud environment. Assets come with two forms of communication mechanisms:
The biggest limitation is often legacy assets that do not have any connectivity and communication capability. This limitation requires facilities to upgrade, modernize, or replace these assets to support data communication.
Operations evaluation provides a view of current limitations and constraints that are related to facility people and processes. Operations include asset retiring or replacing impact, product impact (for example, seasonal, where raw material is available based on the season and may come at higher costs), regulations, and costs that can impact investment in smart manufacturing initiatives and edge computing.
Locations are reviewed for constraints that are associated with facilities, whether located in urban or rural areas. A constraint can be related to: