Toward Field-Level Device Orchestration in Industrial Multiaccess Edge Computing Deployments: A Unified IT–OT Framework

The integration of multiaccess edge computing (MEC) in Industry 4.0 enhances latency, reliability, data privacy, and bandwidth efficiency, while enabling the consumption of advanced features exposed by the network. MEC, combined with cloud-native paradigms, supports device virtualization and disaggregation, enabling new use cases. However, existing scholarship has focused on the integration of MEC at the industrial edge, and does not consider the orchestration of virtualized field-level devices in industrial MEC. Further, field-level devices typically have specific hardware and software features that are not currently catered to in MEC standards. To bridge these gaps, this article proposes a cloud-native MEC architecture designed to manage distributed industrial resources and containerized applications, with enhanced capabilities for the orchestration of field-level devices with specific features, thus creating a unified IT–operational technology (OT) framework to manage resources and applications from the industrial edge to the field level. Enriched application descriptors are proposed to cater for device-specific features, such as the availability of grippers in automated guided vehicles (AGVs). The architecture is validated for the deployment of applications on a simulated multi-AGV scenario.