Emerging Paradigms and Architectures for Industry 4.0 Applications

[Abstract]: The Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR), called “Industry 4.0” in Europe, “Industrial Internet of Things” in North America, or “Made in China 2025” in China, blurs the boundaries between the physical, digital and biological worlds, paving the way to the continuous improvement of manufacturing processes. The 4IR-enabling technologies such as Industrial Cyber–Physical Systems (ICPS), Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) technologies, novel computing paradigms (e.g., fog, mist, and edge computing), Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLTs) (e.g., blockchain), digital twins, and augmented/mixed reality technologies, enable novel cyber-secure, resilient, collaborative and human-centric advanced manufacturing systems. This Special Issue aims to report the latest breakthroughs in architectures, paradigms, and applications in the ever-increasing complex ecosystem of smart manufacturing. A total of eleven research papers were published in this Special Issue, approaching several fields of Industry 4.0 paradigm, such as Low-Power Wide-Area Network (LPWAN) technologies, additive manufacturing, energy harvesting, Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), Cyber–Physical Systems (CPS), Artificial Intelligence (AI) or cybersecurity.Centro de Investigación de Galicia “CITIC”; ED431G 2019/01Xunta de Galicia; ED431C 2020/15Agencia Estatal de Investigación; PID2020-118857RA-I00 and PID2019-104958RB-C42FEDER Galicia 2014–2020 & AEI/FEDER Programs, U

Industrial Internet of Things, Big Data, and Artificial Intelligence in the Smart Factory: a survey and perspective

International audienceThanks to the rapid development and applications of advanced technologies, we are experiencing the fourth industrial revolution, or Industry 4.0, which is a revolution towards smart manufacturing. The wide use of cyber physical systems and Internet of Things leads to the era of Big Data in industrial manufacturing. Artificial Intelligence algorithms emerge as powerful analytics tools to process and analyze the Big Data. These advanced technologies result in the introduction of a new concept in the Industry 4.0: the smart Factory. In order to fully understand this new concept in the context of the Industry 4.0, this paper provides a survey on the key components of a smart factory and the link between them, including the Industrial Internet of Things, Big Data and Artificial Intelligence. Several studies and techniques that are used to enable smart manufacturing are reviewed. Finally, we discuss some perspectives for further researches

A framework for smart production-logistics systems based on CPS and industrial IoT

Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) has received increasing attention from both academia and industry. However, several challenges including excessively long waiting time and a serious waste of energy still exist in the IIoT-based integration between production and logistics in job shops. To address these challenges, a framework depicting the mechanism and methodology of smart production-logistics systems is proposed to implement intelligent modeling of key manufacturing resources and investigate self-organizing configuration mechanisms. A data-driven model based on analytical target cascading is developed to implement the self-organizing configuration. A case study based on a Chinese engine manufacturer is presented to validate the feasibility and evaluate the performance of the proposed framework and the developed method. The results show that the manufacturing time and the energy consumption are reduced and the computing time is reasonable. This paper potentially enables manufacturers to deploy IIoT-based applications and improve the efficiency of production-logistics systems

Machine Tool Communication (MTComm) Method and Its Applications in a Cyber-Physical Manufacturing Cloud

The integration of cyber-physical systems and cloud manufacturing has the potential to revolutionize existing manufacturing systems by enabling better accessibility, agility, and efficiency. To achieve this, it is necessary to establish a communication method of manufacturing services over the Internet to access and manage physical machines from cloud applications. Most of the existing industrial automation protocols utilize Ethernet based Local Area Network (LAN) and are not designed specifically for Internet enabled data transmission. Recently MTConnect has been gaining popularity as a standard for monitoring status of machine tools through RESTful web services and an XML based messaging structure, but it is only designed for data collection and interpretation and lacks remote operation capability. This dissertation presents the design, development, optimization, and applications of a service-oriented Internet-scale communication method named Machine Tool Communication (MTComm) for exchanging manufacturing services in a Cyber-Physical Manufacturing Cloud (CPMC) to enable manufacturing with heterogeneous physically connected machine tools from geographically distributed locations over the Internet. MTComm uses an agent-adapter based architecture and a semantic ontology to provide both remote monitoring and operation capabilities through RESTful services and XML messages. MTComm was successfully used to develop and implement multi-purpose applications in in a CPMC including remote and collaborative manufacturing, active testing-based and edge-based fault diagnosis and maintenance of machine tools, cross-domain interoperability between Internet-of-things (IoT) devices and supply chain robots etc. To improve MTComm’s overall performance, efficiency, and acceptability in cyber manufacturing, the concept of MTComm’s edge-based middleware was introduced and three optimization strategies for data catching, transmission, and operation execution were developed and adopted at the edge. Finally, a hardware prototype of the middleware was implemented on a System-On-Chip based FPGA device to reduce computational and transmission latency. At every stage of its development, MTComm’s performance and feasibility were evaluated with experiments in a CPMC testbed with three different types of manufacturing machine tools. Experimental results demonstrated MTComm’s excellent feasibility for scalable cyber-physical manufacturing and superior performance over other existing approaches

Machine Tool Communication (MTComm) Method and Its Applications in a Cyber-Physical Manufacturing Cloud

The integration of cyber-physical systems and cloud manufacturing has the potential to revolutionize existing manufacturing systems by enabling better accessibility, agility, and efficiency. To achieve this, it is necessary to establish a communication method of manufacturing services over the Internet to access and manage physical machines from cloud applications. Most of the existing industrial automation protocols utilize Ethernet based Local Area Network (LAN) and are not designed specifically for Internet enabled data transmission. Recently MTConnect has been gaining popularity as a standard for monitoring status of machine tools through RESTful web services and an XML based messaging structure, but it is only designed for data collection and interpretation and lacks remote operation capability. This dissertation presents the design, development, optimization, and applications of a service-oriented Internet-scale communication method named Machine Tool Communication (MTComm) for exchanging manufacturing services in a Cyber-Physical Manufacturing Cloud (CPMC) to enable manufacturing with heterogeneous physically connected machine tools from geographically distributed locations over the Internet. MTComm uses an agent-adapter based architecture and a semantic ontology to provide both remote monitoring and operation capabilities through RESTful services and XML messages. MTComm was successfully used to develop and implement multi-purpose applications in in a CPMC including remote and collaborative manufacturing, active testing-based and edge-based fault diagnosis and maintenance of machine tools, cross-domain interoperability between Internet-of-things (IoT) devices and supply chain robots etc. To improve MTComm’s overall performance, efficiency, and acceptability in cyber manufacturing, the concept of MTComm’s edge-based middleware was introduced and three optimization strategies for data catching, transmission, and operation execution were developed and adopted at the edge. Finally, a hardware prototype of the middleware was implemented on a System-On-Chip based FPGA device to reduce computational and transmission latency. At every stage of its development, MTComm’s performance and feasibility were evaluated with experiments in a CPMC testbed with three different types of manufacturing machine tools. Experimental results demonstrated MTComm’s excellent feasibility for scalable cyber-physical manufacturing and superior performance over other existing approaches