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Mitsubishi Electric Corp. (Tokyo, Japan) announced that a factory automation platform as a service (FA PaaS) testbed, which is under joint development by Mitsubishi Electric, Hitachi Ltd. and Intel Corp., has been approved by the Industrial Internet Consortium (IIC) in the United States. The IIC is an open-membership, international, not-for-profit consortium interested in the establishment of architectural frameworks and overall directions for the Industrial Internet.

The testbed is expected to facilitate the integration of Internet of Things (IoT) systems to connect manufacturing sites and head offices for strengthened operations and globalization of supply chains as well as improved production quality, delivery time and productivity when responding to sudden changes in markets. The companies involved intend to establish an open-interface platform that integrates factory automation (FA) and information systems (IT) by June of 2017.

Mitsubishi Electric will develop FA edge devices, applications and other FA-related products such as programmable controllers and drive units in order to leverage its e-Factory IoT concept. Hitachi and Intel will handle IT-related products such as IoT gateways and cloud systems.

After verifying the security of FA-IT interface platform connections and the flow of operational data, the testbed platform will be offered to IIC member companies and potential users to help facilitate their development of FA applications.