Accessing and Interpreting OPC UA Event Traces based on Semantic Process Descriptions

The analysis of event data from production systems is the basis for many applications associated with Industry 4.0. However, heterogeneous and disjoint data is common in this domain. As a consequence, contextual information of an event might be incomplete or improperly interpreted which results in suboptimal analysis results. This paper proposes an approach to access a production systems' event data based on the event data's context (such as the product type, process type or process parameters). The approach extracts filtered event logs from a database system by combining: 1) a semantic model of a production system's hierarchical structure, 2) a formalized process description and 3) an OPC UA information model. As a proof of concept we demonstrate our approach using a sample server based on OPC UA for Machinery Companion Specifications.Comment: Copyright 2022 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other work

From Machinery to Insights: A Comprehensive Data Acquisition Approach for Battery Cell Production

To ensure the widespread use of sustainably produced battery cells, further progress in research is needed. The transition to automated data acquisition is complicated by the technical complexity of industrial data acquisition. Existing software solutions also fall short in meeting usability, reproducibility, extensibility, and cost-effectiveness requirements for research-scale battery production lines. To address these gaps, this paper presents and evaluates a comprehensive data acquisition and collection solution for research-scale battery production lines. It offers a systematic overview of the industrial data acquisition process, focusing on gathering data from various existing machinery and utilizing the industry standard OPC UA protocol. Given the lack of existing solutions that meet the specified requirements, the paper introduces the "ProductionPilot" software as a solution. "ProductionPilot" is designed to provide an extensible platform with a user-friendly web interface. It enables users to select, structure, monitor, and export live production data delivered via OPC UA. The effectiveness of the proposed system is validated at the CELLFAB battery production research facility at eLab of RWTH Aachen university, demonstrating its capability for long-term data acquisition and the generation of digital shadows. By addressing the limitations of current data collection methods and providing a comprehensive solution, this research aims to facilitate the broader adoption of lithium-ion batteries in renewable energy applications

Semantic Asset Administration Shells in Industry 4.0: A Survey

The Asset Administration Shell (AAS) is a fundamental concept in the Reference Architecture Model for Industry 4.0 (RAMI 4.0), that provides a virtual and digital representation of all information and functions of a physical asset in a manufacturing environment. Recently, Semantic AASs have emerged that add knowledge representation formalisms to enhance the digital representation of physical assets. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive survey of the scientific contributions to Semantic AASs that model the Information and Communication Layer within RAMI 4.0, and summarise and demonstrate their structure, communication, functionalities, and use cases. We also highlight the challenges of future development of Semantic AASs

Bridging OPC UA and DPWS for Industrial SOA

Two web-service based specifications, OPC Unified Architecture (OPC UA) and Devices Profile for Web Services (DPWS), have been proposed by various researchers and organizations as possible enabling technologies for an event-driven Service Oriented Architecture for monitoring and control in manufacturing applications. This paper aims to propose and demonstrate an approach for bridging these two technologies in a way that is applicable in existing industrial applications. A merger between OPC UA and DPWS that effectively combines their complementary strengths could help pave the path toward future industrial event-driven SOA applications, with the inherent modularity, agility, and interoperability envisioned by researchers today. A representation of DPWS devices, services, operations and events in the OPC UA data model is proposed, and a DPWS Module is developed for Ignition, a commercially available HMI/SCADA and MES platform with integrated OPC UA Server. The module discovers DPWS devices in a local network, creates the representation in the address space, and handles subscriptions, input and output parameter values, and invoking operations. A Complex Event Processing component based on Microsoft’s StreamInsight is also integrated with the system, input and output adapters exposing web service interfaces. The system prototype developed will be used as the base for a use case demonstrator in the European Commission’s Framework Package 7 Project, “Architecture for Service-Oriented Process Monitoring and Control (IMC AESOP).” The project aims to develop a system of systems approach for monitoring and control, based on SOA for very large-scale systems in the process industries

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

Prototyping and Evaluation of Sensor Data Integration in Cloud Platforms

The SFI Smart Ocean centre has initiated a long-running project which consists of developing a wireless and autonomous marine observation system for monitoring of underwater environments and structures. The increasing popularity of integrating the Internet of Things (IoT) with Cloud Computing has led to promising infrastructures that could realize Smart Ocean's goals. The project will utilize underwater wireless sensor networks (UWSNs) for collecting data in the marine environments and develop a cloud-based platform for retrieving, processing, and storing all the sensor data. Currently, the project is in its early stages and the collaborating partners are researching approaches and technologies that can potentially be utilized. This thesis contributes to the centre's ongoing research, focusing on the aspect of how sensor data can be integrated into three different cloud platforms: Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services, and the Google Cloud Platform. The goals were to develop prototypes that could successfully send data to the chosen cloud platforms and evaluate their applicability in context of the Smart Ocean project. In order to determine the most suitable option, each platform was evaluated based on set of defined criteria, focusing on their sensor data integration capabilities. The thesis has also investigated the cloud platforms' supported protocol bindings, as well as several candidate technologies for metadata standards and compared them in surveys. Our evaluation results shows that all three cloud platforms handle sensor data integration in very similar ways, offering a set of cloud services relevant for creating diverse IoT solutions. However, the Google Cloud Platform ranks at the bottom due to the lack of IoT focus on their platform, with less service options, features, and capabilities compared to the other two. Both Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services rank very close to each other, as they provide many of the same sensor data integration capabilities, making them the most applicable options.Masteroppgave i Programutvikling samarbeid med HVLPROG399MAMN-PRO

Efficient State Update Exchange in a CPS Environment for Linked Data-based Digital Twins

International audienceThis paper addresses the problem of reducing the number of messages needed to exchange state updates between the Cyber-Physical System (CPS) components that integrate with the rest of the CPS through Digital Twins in order to maintain uniform communication interface and carry out their tasks correctly and safely. The main contribution is a proposed architecture and the discussion of its suitability to support correct execution of complex tasks across the CPS. A new State Event Filtering component is presented to provide event-based communication among Digital Twins that are based on the Linked Data principles while keeping the fan-out limited to ensure the scalability of the architecture

A Knowledge Graph Based Integration Approach for Industry 4.0

The fourth industrial revolution, Industry 4.0 (I40) aims at creating smart factories employing among others Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS), Internet of Things (IoT) and Artificial Intelligence (AI). Realizing smart factories according to the I40 vision requires intelligent human-to-machine and machine-to-machine communication. To achieve this communication, CPS along with their data need to be described and interoperability conflicts arising from various representations need to be resolved. For establishing interoperability, industry communities have created standards and standardization frameworks. Standards describe main properties of entities, systems, and processes, as well as interactions among them. Standardization frameworks classify, align, and integrate industrial standards according to their purposes and features. Despite being published by official international organizations, different standards may contain divergent definitions for similar entities. Further, when utilizing the same standard for the design of a CPS, different views can generate interoperability conflicts. Albeit expressive, standardization frameworks may represent divergent categorizations of the same standard to some extent, interoperability conflicts need to be resolved to support effective and efficient communication in smart factories. To achieve interoperability, data need to be semantically integrated and existing conflicts conciliated. This problem has been extensively studied in the literature. Obtained results can be applied to general integration problems. However, current approaches fail to consider specific interoperability conflicts that occur between entities in I40 scenarios. In this thesis, we tackle the problem of semantic data integration in I40 scenarios. A knowledge graphbased approach allowing for the integration of entities in I40 while considering their semantics is presented. To achieve this integration, there are challenges to be addressed on different conceptual levels. Firstly, defining mappings between standards and standardization frameworks; secondly, representing knowledge of entities in I40 scenarios described by standards; thirdly, integrating perspectives of CPS design while solving semantic heterogeneity issues; and finally, determining real industry applications for the presented approach. We first devise a knowledge-driven approach allowing for the integration of standards and standardization frameworks into an Industry 4.0 knowledge graph (I40KG). The standards ontology is used for representing the main properties of standards and standardization frameworks, as well as relationships among them. The I40KG permits to integrate standards and standardization frameworks while solving specific semantic heterogeneity conflicts in the domain. Further, we semantically describe standards in knowledge graphs. To this end, standards of core importance for I40 scenarios are considered, i.e., the Reference Architectural Model for I40 (RAMI4.0), AutomationML, and the Supply Chain Operation Reference Model (SCOR). In addition, different perspectives of entities describing CPS are integrated into the knowledge graphs. To evaluate the proposed methods, we rely on empirical evaluations as well as on the development of concrete use cases. The attained results provide evidence that a knowledge graph approach enables the effective data integration of entities in I40 scenarios while solving semantic interoperability conflicts, thus empowering the communication in smart factories

DIN Spec 91345 RAMI 4.0 compliant data pipelining: An approach to support data understanding and data acquisition in smart manufacturing environments

Today, data scientists in the manufacturing domain are confronted with a set of challenges associated to data acquisition as well as data processing including the extraction of valuable in-formation to support both, the work of the manufacturing equipment as well as the manufacturing processes behind it. One essential aspect related to data acquisition is the pipelining, including various commu-nication standards, protocols and technologies to save and transfer heterogenous data. These circumstances make it hard to understand, find, access and extract data from the sources depend-ing on use cases and applications. In order to support this data pipelining process, this thesis proposes the use of the semantic model. The selected semantic model should be able to describe smart manufacturing assets them-selves as well as to access their data along their life-cycle. As a matter of fact, there are many research contributions in smart manufacturing, which already came out with reference architectures or standards for semantic-based meta data descrip-tion or asset classification. This research builds upon these outcomes and introduces a novel se-mantic model-based data pipelining approach using as a basis the Reference Architecture Model for Industry 4.0 (RAMI 4.0).Hoje em dia, os cientistas de dados no domínio da manufatura são confrontados com várias normas, protocolos e tecnologias de comunicação para gravar, processar e transferir vários tipos de dados. Estas circunstâncias tornam difícil compreender, encontrar, aceder e extrair dados necessários para aplicações dependentes de casos de utilização, desde os equipamentos aos respectivos processos de manufatura. Um aspecto essencial poderia ser um processo de canalisação de dados incluindo vários normas de comunicação, protocolos e tecnologias para gravar e transferir dados. Uma solução para suporte deste processo, proposto por esta tese, é a aplicação de um modelo semântico que descreva os próprios recursos de manufactura inteligente e o acesso aos seus dados ao longo do seu ciclo de vida. Muitas das contribuições de investigação em manufatura inteligente já produziram arquitecturas de referência como a RAMI 4.0 ou normas para a descrição semântica de meta dados ou classificação de recursos. Esta investigação baseia-se nestas fontes externas e introduz um novo modelo semântico baseado no Modelo de Arquitectura de Referência para Indústria 4.0 (RAMI 4.0), em conformidade com a abordagem de canalisação de dados no domínio da produção inteligente como caso exemplar de utilização para permitir uma fácil exploração, compreensão, descoberta, selecção e extracção de dados