Hardware has long been the anchor holding back factory innovation, but Audi is breaking that cycle with its groundbreaking Edge Cloud for Production (EC4P) project. This transformative initiative, detailed in a recent ARC Advisory Group’s White Paper, positions Audi at the absolute forefront of smart manufacturing, demonstrating a bold vision for software-defined factories and data-driven decision-making. As Audi shifts from concept to production, we extend our heartfelt congratulations to Audi for this industry-first milestone!
At its core, EC4P embodies the simple yet profound tenet: “Software, not hardware.” Audi initiated the EC4P project to transition from a hardware-centric assembly line to a software-defined factory. By replacing thousands of individual pieces of hardware with a centralized, virtualized server cluster, Audi decoupled control logic from physical machinery. This shift was driven by the need to reduce maintenance complexity, improve cybersecurity, and increase production agility within their 360factory strategy. EC4P allows Audi to deploy software updates globally and reconfigure production lines for different vehicle models with unprecedented speed and cost-efficiency.
What makes EC4P an industry first? No carmaker before Audi had so boldly created a plant architecture that harnesses the efficiencies of a modern IT-like setup while meticulously considering the unique priorities and requirements of the Operational Technology (OT) environment.
By turning the long-discussed IT/OT partnership into practical reality, EC4P’s on-premises private cloud architecture delivers 100 microseconds network latency, essential for real-time control applications. This allows them to virtualize production assets such as Industrial PCs, HMI equipment, programmable logic controllers (PLCs), and even safety PLCs. Overall, EC4P creates a production environment that is both scalable and ready for the future.
IT-based production has been a goal of Audi’s for years, and EC4P is a crucial step towards it. Cisco has been a key partner of Audi’s on EC4P for over 6 years, and together we’ve marked many milestones. This latest milestone builds on all the others and puts the car maker in the driver’s seat, setting the pace for the industry.
Cisco is immensely proud to have played a pivotal role in this groundbreaking endeavor. Our contribution to EC4P was multifaceted, ensuring the foundational infrastructure was robust, resilient, and ready for the demands of a modern, software-defined factory.
Zero downtime: Cisco provides the critical networking infrastructure that underpins EC4P ensuring high availability and fault tolerance for all production and compute resources from the shop floor to the data center. Our Industrial Ethernet switches, deliver advanced resiliency that guarantees seamless communication even during network failures, ensuring zero recovery time and no packet loss—a non-negotiable requirement for OT environments.
Seamless shop floor extension to data centers: Cisco Software-Defined Access (SD-Access or SDA) modernizes network architecture by using a centralized controller to simplify the management of production zones and security. By utilizing advanced protocols like Virtual Extensible LAN (VXLAN), SD-Access allows virtualized automation applications to function as if they were still physically connected to the shop floor, even when hosted in a data center miles away. This capability is essential for bridging the distance between production sites and data centers without sacrificing real-time performance.
Comprehensive protection and monitoring: Cisco’s solutions provide robust security (through Cisco Identity Services Engine or ISE), network latency telemetry (with Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance or PCA), and simplified network management (using Cisco Catalyst Center), along with full-stack observability via Splunk, ensuring the entire technology stack is protected and monitored.
Proven integration: Cisco provided an end-to-end proving environment – a comprehensive test-bed – to validate critical multi-vendor integration, scale, and resilience of the EC4P architecture. This laboratory environment was instrumental in bringing together Audi, Siemens, and VMware by Broadcom to integrate and rigorously test their products. Cisco acted as a technology enabler, allowing each vendor to set up and monitor their applications, ensuring full coordination and quick resolution of any observed problems. This collaborative testing phase was critical in proving the solution’s viability, ironing out complexities, and preparing it for Audi’s demanding production environment, delivering a ready solution for further testing and deployment. Through this, Cisco helped Audi bridge the gap between IT and OT, delivering a validated design.
“For Edge Cloud 4 Production (EC4P), Cisco provides the critical network infrastructure that ensures production and computing resources are available from the factory floor to the data center. Cisco is our partner in ensuring seamless and resilient communication for industrial applications. With the Cisco team at our side, we were able to implement the project within a very short period of time.”
~Sven Müller, EC4P project manager, Audi
With EC4P, Audi significantly improved security, and reduced costs, energy consumption, and maintenance overhead. This shift improves their overall equipment effectiveness (OEE) and provides a scalable architecture ready for deployment across more than 100 Volkswagen Group plants globally.
Audi’s EC4P project allows them to innovate at the speed of software without the constraints of proprietary hardware. EC4P is now a beacon for the manufacturing industry. Adopt the new benchmark in smart manufacturing today to secure your competitive edge in a data-driven world.
To delve deeper into this transformative initiative, view Audi’s press release and read the full ARC Advisory Group’s White Paper. To begin your own journey toward a more efficient, software-defined, and virtualized production environment, we invite you schedule a 1:1 consultation with a Cisco manufacturing expert to learn more about powering the factories of the future.