Factory 4.0 attempts to gather several principles to help in the development of factory automation. Data is the corner stone around which information for decision making or maintenance, device interconnection for data fusion and decentralization are built.
MicroEJ solutions transfer computing and gateway principles to the heart of IoT edge devices.
Factory automation requires many different devices, specialized in tasks or communication interfaces and suppliers often have issues in managing their product ranges with so many derivatives.
MICROEJ VEE is an embedded software platform providing abstraction of underlying hardware and middleware to application software layers. Electronic developers can use electronics that fit best their needs and keep software developers away from their choice as MICROEJ VEE will minimize the impact on software. Any application such as Graphical User Interface, signal processing, Cloud interface can be shared across numerous specialized and unique devices.
Actuators, sensors and industrial gateways often deal with real-time response mixing hardware and software. This often prevents developers to use high level software programming technologies and therefore suffer from a lack of software engineering support.
MicroEJ solutions, fully dedicated to embedded systems, combines both technologies such as virtualization for hardware abstraction and real-time behavior. Developers can concentrate on solving software problems without having to deal with hardware related optimizations.
“We are working with MicroEJ to bring the software-defined approach to our products, so that our customers can take advantage of distributed intelligence for a rapid response to changing energy needs.”
Peter Wecksser,
Executive Vice President, Chief Digital Officer at Schneider Electric
For devices requiring human interactions, user interface and especially Graphical User Interfaces (GUI) are key to ensure the proper use of the device.
MicroEJ solutions for GUI design assists developers in prototyping the user interface to investigate what are the best implementations to make the user feel comfortable. Finding the best user experience also increases the product value as advanced functionalities can be easily adopted by end users.
For devices interfacing in the Cloud, one major challenge is dealing with fast Cloud evolutions against software stability of the firmware (the primary function of a device).
MICROEJ VEE multiple sandbox execution environment allows to partially update the device software without rebooting and without jeopardizing the mission critical firmware. Developers can easily separate each concerns: the main functionality that needs to operate and less critical software like cloud connectivity.