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Getting To Know Margo

Margo User Story
Margo User Story

Margo User Story

Interoperability is a challenge with multiple facets and personas. In order to stay focused on solving the market’s pain points, this persona based user story is the tangible guideline for the collaboration, where the plant operator is at the center. A plant operator is an individual or a team, responsible for keeping a manufacturing process of an industrial manufacturer operational. They are considered having the greatest decision power for Margo adoption as they strive to maximize the uptime of their fleet. Their organizations can scale from enterprises with a single plant with a few production lines, to entities with multiple plants or locations around the world. With respect to Margo’s scope, these plant operators have a common objective: deploy, manage, and maintain a fleet of edge apps & associated hosting devices in an optimized manner.

Plant-Operator-User-Story

These include:
  • Plant Operator: In this primary user story we follow a plant operator who identified two apps promised to improve the throughput of their manufacturing process. These apps are supplied by two different vendors. They first test and validate this promise in a proof of concept in a test line. When the value of the apps is confirmed, they deploy five hundred instances throughout their manufacturing plants across the world. They limit the required tooling for deploying, updating & maintaining their fleet of edge devices and applications throughout their lifecycle, and obtain a single pane of glass to monitor health of the fleet, and to automate necessary actions on their apps and devices hosted at their edge.
    During this journey, the plant operator interacts with multiple personas, each with their own objectives and expectations: App developers, Device manufacturers, Fleet Management Software vendors and Machine builders and system integrators. Amongst these secondary personas, the App developer is likely the most critical one, as his App often delivers the most value to the plant operator. App developers bring the plant operator’s ecosystem to life.
  • Collaboration Platform: App developers deliver the value-add apps that plant operators demand. The app developers desire to build, describe & package their application once and make it available to as many plant operators as possible. They support the deployment at scale of these apps, regardless of the fleet management and observability platforms selected by the plant operators and regardless of the edge compute devices, as long as the capabilities of these hosting devices match the requirements of their apps.
  • Device Manufacturer: A device manufacturer wants to build a device once equipped to host a wide variety of apps adopted by many plant operators at scale, regardless of their selected fleet management software.
  • Fleet Management Software Vendor: A fleet management software vendor wants to build a software platform that manages at scale the fleet of apps and devices for a given plant operator, regardless of the chosen app developers and device manufacturers.
  • System Integrator: A system integrator wants to deliver integration services to plant operators based on reusable deployment patterns with customized apps and devices while allowing plant operators to maintain solutions with the fleet management software of their choice.
  • Machine Builder: A machine builder wants to augment & differentiate their fleet of machines for plant operators through a combination of apps & devices with a single effort while allowing plant operators to deploy and maintain these apps with the fleet management software of their choice.

What must be true

Given the personas defined for Margo’s user story, the following initial objectives must be accomplished to realize the Margo interoperability promise:

These include:
  • Enable app developers to build and package their apps once and support deployments to any Margo-compliant edge device
  • Enable Margo-compliant applications from any app developer to run side-by-side on any Margo-compliant device that meets the app hardware requirements
  • Enable Margo-compliant orchestration software to centrally manage and provide observability for any Margo-compliant application or device at scale
  • Capacity Building: TWG may provide training and mentorship, sharing knowledge and best practices to enhance organisational capacity.

As a plant operator, I have identified two Apps, promising to improve the throughput of my manufacturing process and contributing to the digitalization of my operations. I want to test and validate their value and subsequently deploy and maintain these apps at scale in my

Plant operator perspective
  • 1. I identify two Apps, each from a different vendor, that together improve the throughput of my manufacturing process (example: an AI engine for downtime prediction and a data collection application)
  • 2. I identify an edge device in the existing installed base that matches the app requirements to perform the Proof of Concept.
  • 3. I added the two apps to my organization’s private catalog of apps in a restricted area.
  • 4. I deploy and configure the app instances to the selected edge device.
  • 5. As needed, I configure the device to match some specific App requirements.
  • 6. The Applications are running, and I can act upon the insights delivered by the apps. I confirm that the promised throughput improvement is delivered by the two apps.
  • 7. I observe the health state of the Apps and the hosting Edge device with my existing observability platform.
  • 8. I pay for the billed value delivered by the app vendor. /!\ although this is a crucial step in the user scenario, Margo will not prescribe any billing processes, nor will it provide billing process capabilities. Financial transactions are not in scope for the Margo initiative. At the same time, Margo intends to facilitate this billing process where possible.
  • 9. I deploy the two apps at scale to five hundred devices across my production facilities in different regions. The facilities each have different regional edge device suppliers. I use my single, organization-wide orchestration tooling for this task.
  • 10. I identify the edge device model from my regional device suppliers based on the requirements of the two Apps.
  • 11. I receive the Edge devices in my regional facilities and onboard them in my device orchestration software.
  • 12. With my device orchestration tooling, I provision the Edge devices and update the OS and related drivers & platform components to the current level, as published by the Hardware manufacturer.
  • 13. I interact with my workload orchestration software and initiate the deployment process of the two apps: I request verification of Edge device capabilities versus Apps requirements for the targets.
  • 14. I initiate the deployment & configuration of the five hundred app instances to these new edge devices and configure as required the device capabilities.
  • 15. I observe my fleet of devices and apps in my global observability platform and take corrective actions on notification of unhealthy app instances (example: storage capacity limit reached on the data collection app instance in line five of the Barcelona, Spain plant).
  • 16. The app vendor of the data collection app notified me that a new release containing an advanced data compression feature is available for download in their repository. I want to deploy this feature, as it requires less storage capacity on my hosting devices.
  • 17. Using my workload orchestration software, I schedule a fleet-wide update to all downtime prediction app instances to take advantage of this new data compression feature.
  • 18. I observe my fleet of data collection apps with my global observability platform and confirm these apps consume less storage.

Technical Working Group

The Technical Working Group (TWG) has several essential roles and responsibilities that contribute to the success of our projects and initiatives.

These include:
  • Expertise Provision: TWG members leverage their specialized knowledge to tackle technical challenges and inform decision-making.
  • Collaboration Platform: TWG fosters stakeholder collaboration, integrating diverse perspectives into the project.
  • Recommendations Formulation: The group assesses issues, analyses data, and develops recommendations to guide the project's direction.
  • Progress Monitoring: TWG tracks the implementation of recommendations and monitors progress toward project goals, adapting as needed.
  • Compliance Assurance: Members ensure adherence to regulations and standards, applying best practices in their respective fields.
  • Findings Reporting: TWG documents insights and conclusions, regularly updating the SC on progress and developments.
  • Capacity Building: TWG may provide training and mentorship, sharing knowledge and best practices to enhance organisational capacity.

Through these roles and responsibilities, the Technical Working Group actively contributes to the effective execution and overall success of projects.

Focus Group - Workload Orchestration Agent Interface

Add details - Workload Orchestration Agent Interface

Type of member to collaborate with this Focus Group

Members can access the Workload Orchestration Agent Interface GitHub Repository.

Focus Group - App-Packet Definition

Add details - App-Packet Definition

Type of member to collaborate with this Focus Group

Members can access the App-Packet Definition GitHub Repository.

Focus Group - Device Requirements

Add details - Device Requirements

Type of member to collaborate with this Focus Group

Members can access the Device Requirements GitHub Repository.

Focus Group - App Observability

Add details - App Observability

Type of member to collaborate with this Focus Group

Members can access the App Observability GitHub Repository.