When Operation Technology Meets Information Technology: Challenges and Opportunities

Industry 4.0 has revolutionized process innovation while facilitating and encouraging many new possibilities. The objective of Industry 4.0 is the radical enhancement of productivity, a goal that presupposes the integration of Operational Technology (OT) networks with Information Technology (IT) networks, which were hitherto isolated. This disruptive approach is enabled by adopting several emerging technologies in Enterprise processes. In this manuscript, we discuss what we believe to be one of the main challenges preventing the full employment of Industry 4.0, namely, the integration of Operation Technology networking and Information Technology networking. We discuss the technical challenges alongside the potential tools while providing a state-of-the-art use case scenario. We showcase a possible solution based on the Asset Administration Shell approach, referring to the use case of camera synchronization for collaborative tasks

Kommunikation und Bildverarbeitung in der Automation

In diesem Open Access-Tagungsband sind die besten Beiträge des 11. Jahreskolloquiums "Kommunikation in der Automation" (KommA 2020) und des 7. Jahreskolloquiums "Bildverarbeitung in der Automation" (BVAu 2020) enthalten. Die Kolloquien fanden am 28. und 29. Oktober 2020 statt und wurden erstmalig als digitale Webveranstaltung auf dem Innovation Campus Lemgo organisiert. Die vorgestellten neuesten Forschungsergebnisse auf den Gebieten der industriellen Kommunikationstechnik und Bildverarbeitung erweitern den aktuellen Stand der Forschung und Technik. Die in den Beiträgen enthaltenen anschauliche Anwendungsbeispiele aus dem Bereich der Automation setzen die Ergebnisse in den direkten Anwendungsbezug

Digital Twins for Industry 4.0 in the 6G Era

Having the Fifth Generation (5G) mobile communication system recently rolled out in many countries, the wireless community is now setting its eyes on the next era of Sixth Generation (6G). Inheriting from 5G its focus on industrial use cases, 6G is envisaged to become the infrastructural backbone of future intelligent industry. Especially, a combination of 6G and the emerging technologies of Digital Twins (DT) will give impetus to the next evolution of Industry 4.0 (I4.0) systems. This article provides a survey in the research area of 6G-empowered industrial DT system. With a novel vision of 6G industrial DT ecosystem, this survey discusses the ambitions and potential applications of industrial DT in the 6G era, identifying the emerging challenges as well as the key enabling technologies. The introduced ecosystem is supposed to bridge the gaps between humans, machines, and the data infrastructure, and therewith enable numerous novel application scenarios.Comment: Accepted for publication in IEEE Open Journal of Vehicular Technolog

Wireless Sensor Technology Selection for I4.0 Manufacturing Systems

The term smart manufacturing has surfaced as an industrial revolution in Germany known as Industry 4.0 (I4.0); this revolution aims to help the manufacturers adapt to turbulent market trends. Its main scope is implementing machine communication, both vertically and horizontally across the manufacturing hierarchy through Internet of things (IoT), technologies and servitization concepts. The main objective of this research is to help manufacturers manage the high levels of variety and the extreme turbulence of market trends through developing a selection tool that utilizes Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) techniques to recommend a suitable industrial wireless sensor network (IWSN) technology that fits their manufacturing requirements.In this thesis, IWSN technologies and their properties were identified, analyzed and compared to identify their potential suitability for different industrial manufacturing system application areas. The study included the identification and analysis of different industrial system types, their application areas, scenarios and respective communication requirements. The developed tool’s sensitivity is also tested to recommend different IWSN technology options with changing influential factors. Also, a prioritizing protocol is introduced in the case where more than one IWSN technology options are recommended by the AHP tool.A real industrial case study with the collaboration of SPM Automation Inc. is presented, where the industrial systems’ class, communication traffic types, and communication requirements were analyzed to recommend a suitable IWSN technology that fits their requirements and assists their shift towards I4.0 through utilizing AHP techniques. The results of this research will serve as a step forward, in the transformation process of manufacturing towards a more digitalized and better connected cyber-physical systems; thus, enhancing manufacturing attributes such as flexibility, reconfigurability, scalability and easing the shift towards implementing I4.0

A distributed middleware for IT/OT convergence in modern industrial environments

The modern industrial environment is populated by a myriad of intelligent devices that collaborate for the accomplishment of the numerous business processes in place at the production sites. The close collaboration between humans and work machines poses new interesting challenges that industry must overcome in order to implement the new digital policies demanded by the industrial transition. The Industry 5.0 movement is a companion revolution of the previous Industry 4.0, and it relies on three characteristics that any industrial sector should have and pursue: human centrality, resilience, and sustainability. The application of the fifth industrial revolution cannot be completed without moving from the implementation of Industry 4.0-enabled platforms. The common feature found in the development of this kind of platform is the need to integrate the Information and Operational layers. Our thesis work focuses on the implementation of a platform addressing all the digitization features foreseen by the fourth industrial revolution, making the IT/OT convergence inside production plants an improvement and not a risk. Furthermore, we added modular features to our platform enabling the Industry 5.0 vision. We favored the human centrality using the mobile crowdsensing techniques and the reliability and sustainability using pluggable cloud computing services, combined with data coming from the crowd support. We achieved important and encouraging results in all the domains in which we conducted our experiments. Our IT/OT convergence-enabled platform exhibits the right performance needed to satisfy the strict requirements of production sites. The multi-layer capability of the framework enables the exploitation of data not strictly coming from work machines, allowing a more strict interaction between the company, its employees, and customers

Managing the far-Edge: are today's centralized solutions a good fit

Edge computing has established itself as the foundation for next-generation mobile networks, IT infrastructure, and industrial systems thanks to promised low network latency, computation offloading, and data locality. These properties empower key use-cases like Industry 4.0, Vehicular Communication and Internet of Things. Nowadays implementation of Edge computing is based on extensions to available Cloud computing software tools. While this approach accelerates adoption, it hinders the deployment of the aforementioned use-cases that requires an infrastructure largely more decentralized than Cloud data centers, notably in the far-Edge of the network. In this context, this work aims at: (i) to analyze the differences between Cloud and Edge infrastructures, (ii) to analyze the architecture adopted by the most prominent open-source Edge computing solutions, and (iii) to experimentally evaluate those solutions in terms of scalability and service instantiation time in a medium-size far Edge system. Results show that mainstream Edge solutions require powerful centralized controllers and always-on connectivity, making them unsuitable for highly decentralized scenarios in the far-Edge where stable and high-bandwidth links are not ubiquitous.This work has been partially funded by the H2020 collaborative Europe/Taiwan research project 5G-DIVE (grant no. 589881) and by the H2020 European collaborative research project DAEMON (grant no. 101017109)