AIDA – a holistic AI-driven networking and processing framework for industrial IoT applications

Industry 4.0 is characterized by digitalized production facilities, where a large volume of sensors collect a vast amount of data that is used to increase the sustainability of the production by e.g. optimizing process parameters, reducing machine downtime and material waste, and the like. However, making intelligent data-driven decisions under timeliness constraints requires the integration of time-sensitive networks with reliable data ingestion and processing infrastructure with plug-in support of Machine Learning (ML) pipelines. However, such integration is difficult due to the lack of frameworks that flexibly integrate and program the networking and computing infrastructures, while allowing ML pipelines to ingest the collected data and make trustworthy decisions in real time. In this paper, we present AIDA - a novel holistic AI-driven network and processing framework for reliable data-driven real-time industrial IoT applications. AIDA manages and configures Time-Sensitive networks (TSN) to enable real-time data ingestion into an observable AI-powered edge/cloud continuum. Pluggable and trustworthy ML components that make timely decisions for various industrial IoT applications and the infrastructure itself are an intrinsic part of AIDA. We introduce the AIDA architecture, demonstrate the building blocks of our framework and illustrate it with two use cases.