AWS and Volkswagen team up on the factory of the future

Volkwagen logo
Image Credit: Pixabay (Image credit: Image Credit: Pixabay)

AWS and the Volkswagen Group are joining forces to transform automotive manufacturing with the announcement of a new multi-year, global agreement to build the Volkswagen Industrial Cloud.

The German automaker will rely on the cloud giant's portfolio of services including IoT, machine learning, analytics and compute services to increase plant efficiency and uptime, improve production feasibility and increase vehicle quality.

The Volkswagen Industrial Cloud will gather real-time data from all of its 122 manufacturing plants to manage the overall effectiveness of assembly equipment as well as track parts and vehicles.

Volkswagen will leverage AWS' suite of 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 fright from the plant floor.

Volkswagen Industrial Cloud

A company-wide data lake built on Amazon S3 will allow Volkswagen to analyze the data from its plants to glean insights that will pinpoint operational trends to help improve forecasting and streamline operations by identifying gaps in production and waste.

The automaker will also use Amazon SageMaker to optimize the operation of machinery and equipment in all of its plants by building, training and deploying advanced machine learning models.

Volkswagen will also use AWS Outposts to bring native AWS services, infrastructure and operating models on-premise to provide seamless functionality between the factory floor and the cloud for latency sensitive operations.

Chairman of the Executive Board of Porsche AG and Member of the Board of Management of Volkwagen, Oliver Blume praised the new partnership, saying:

“We will continue to strengthen production as a key competitive factor for the Volkswagen Group. Our strategic collaboration with AWS will lay the foundation. The Volkswagen Group, with its global expertise in automobile production, and AWS, with its technological know-how, complement each other extraordinarily well. With our global industry platform we want to create a growing industrial ecosystem with transparency and efficiency bringing benefits to all concerned.” 

Anthony Spadafora

After working with the TechRadar Pro team for the last several years, Anthony is now the security and networking editor at Tom’s Guide where he covers everything from data breaches and ransomware gangs to the best way to cover your whole home or business with Wi-Fi. When not writing, you can find him tinkering with PCs and game consoles, managing cables and upgrading his smart home.