A Low-Code Development Framework for Constructing Industrial Apps

With the advent of the Industry 4.0, intelligent manufacturing has become a technological highland to conquer in the process of enterprise digitalization. As the core competitiveness of intelligent manufacturing, industrial apps, with new features such as customization and lightweight, has emerged as a new type of industrial software. Traditional development methods and tools can hardly meet the large demand of industrial software on account of its long development cycles while low-code development can greatly improve the productivity of industrial software, lower the barriers and reduce costs for development. Therefore, the research and application of low-code development for industrial apps has received much attention. Industrial Internet platforms such as Siemens, OutSystems have successively launched low-code tools. However, there is still a lack of an open, unified low-code development framework in industry. In response to the above problems, we propose a low-code framework to develop industrial apps quickly and easily, which paves the way for leveraging the crowd intelligence of worldwide developers to improve the productivity of developing industrial apps. Based on BPMN2.0 and Apache Activiti engine, this framework provides drag-and-drop process design, one-click process deployment and operation, data monitoring and other functions. In this paper, we present a prototype system of a low-code development framework and demonstrate its functions through a use case of developing a predictive maintenance application. Finally, the aircraft turbine life data is used to verify the effectiveness of the system.