Making Smart Cars Smarter: IIC and EdgeX Roll Into Motion

Wanxiang Group and Thingswise, supported by Dell Technologies, Xilinx, China Unicom, and China Academy of Information and Communication Technology (CAICT) are pushing the limits of factory automation improvements starting with a new testbed sponsored by the Industrial Internet Consortium (IIC) and powered by The Linux Foundation's EdgeX Foundry open edge computing framework. Earlier this month, the IIC announced the Optimizing Manufacturing Processes by Artificial Intelligence (OMPAI) testbed, exploring the application of artificial intelligence (AI) and industrial internet technologies, deployed from the edge to the cloud. Clearly, given the ambitious vision to make machines smarter to build better and more beautiful cars, it takes an ecosystem to turn what used to be heavily human tasks and into machine driven routines, and the IIC, arguably the largest and most active global organization supporting the advancement of the Industrial Internet, brought the talent together initially. The OMPAI testbed is led by IIC members Wanxiang Group and Thingswise, two technology innovation driven companies in the world's largest automotive market, China. The automotive industry in China has been the largest in the world measured by automobile unit production since 2008, and since 2009, annual production of automobiles in China exceeds that of the European Union and that of the United States and Japan combined.