Volkswagen looks to AWS to build its Industrial Cloud

Amazon Web Services has been awarded a multi-year, global agreement to build the Volkswagen Industrial Cloud, a cloud-based Industrial digital production platform that will transform the automotive company’s manufacturing and logistics processes.

Volkswagen will rely upon the breadth and depth of AWS’s portfolio of services, including IoT, machine learning, analytics, and compute services to increase plant efficiency and uptime, improve production flexibility, and increase vehicle quality.

The Volkswagen Industrial Cloud will bring together real-time data from all of the Volkswagen Group’s 122 manufacturing plants to manage the overall effectiveness of assembly equipment, as well as track parts and vehicles.

Volkswagen will use the suite of AWS IoT services, including AWS IoT Greengrass, AWS IoT Core, AWS IoT Analytics, and AWS IoT SiteWise, to detect, collect, organize, and run sophisticated analytics on data from the plant floor.

A key idea is to assemble a company-wide Data Lake built on Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) to analyze the data.  Volkswagen will use Amazon SageMaker, a fully-managed service that provides developers and data scientists with the ability to build, train, and deploy machine learning models quickly, to optimize the operation of machinery and equipment in all of its plants. Additionally, Volkswagen plans to use AWS Outposts, which bring native AWS services, infrastructure, and operating models on-premises, providing seamless functionality between the factory floor and the cloud for latency sensitive applications, offering a consistent hybrid experience.