- Digital platforms act as mediator for many types of transactions and processes in various areas in business life. Especially, IoT platforms find increased use within companies. Still, the allocation of computation workload between a platform and exist-ing information systems is not clear. At the same time, companies have no guideline, which platform to choose to facilitate intra-com-pany optimizations. The platforms in the market are not fully designed or tailored for meeting the special needs of companies - especially in the manufacturing industry. To tackle these challenges, this article first gives an overview of the Internet of Production reference framework. In that context, it secondly investigates 212 IoT platforms in the market and then chooses the best options by stepwise narrowing down their number. Following, those selected platforms are described in detail. Additionally, the article provides a comparison of selected IoT platforms, which then creates the general framework of a platform especially designed for the manufacturing industry in terms of its features and functionalities. This reference platform architecture is developed for reaching the potential of the Internet of Production. This general framework and the representative reference architecture can help companies and software vendors to implement the Internet of Production reference architecture by creating an IoT platform, which fits its needs.
