Swinburne University is hosting an industrial IoT centre at its Hawthorn campus that is powered by Siemens’ MindSphere technology.

The “demonstration and application centre for a cloud-based open Industrial IoT operating system” is students, academics and industry partners.

It is hoped they will use it “to collaborate and co-create local and global projects on … MindSphere.”

“This is the first-of-its-kind industry-university partnership for MindSphere in Australia,” Siemens Australia’s chairman and CEO Jeff Connolly said in a statement.

MindSphere is used to connect physical manufacturing, energy and infrastructure assets to IP networks, and “already has over one million connected devices and systems worldwide”, Siemens said.

It is “helping organisations across the world connect their products, plants, systems and machines to harness the wealth of their data generated by IoT with advanced analytics.”

“The centre will facilitate the creation of applications in advanced manufacturing, smart cities and transport, health and other areas,” Swinburne’s deputy vice chancellor of research and development, Professor Aleksandar Subic, said.

“This is an important stage in the implementation of our Industry 4.0 strategy.

“Students across the entire education and training continuum, from apprenticeships across bachelor’s and master’s programs and all the way to PhD research, will be developing and using this technology for different industrial applications as part of their learning in collaboration with industry.”