Industrial agents in the era of service-oriented architectures and cloudbased industrial infrastructures

The umbrella paradigm underpinning novel collaborative industrial systems is to consider the set of intelligent system units as a conglomerate of distributed, autonomous, intelligent, proactive, fault-tolerant, and reusable units, which operate as a set of cooperating entities (Colombo and Karnouskos, 2009). These entities are forming an evolvable infrastructure, entering and/or going out (plug-in/plugout) in an asynchronous manner. Moreover, these entities, having each of them their own functionalities, data, and associated information are now connected and able to interact. They are capable of working in a proactive manner, initiating collaborative actions and dynamically interacting with each other in order to achieve both local and global objectives.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Interoperability between OPC UA and oneM2M

AbstractA key requirement of realizing the connected world featured by IoT is to ensure interoperability among different connected devices. Interoperability is also at the basis of the realization of the novel vision of Industry 4.0; a lot effort is put to make interoperable the interchange of information between industrial applications, also including IoT ecosystems. For this reason, during these last years, several approaches aimed to enhance interoperability between industrial applications and IoT appeared in the literature. In this paper an interoperability proposal is presented. It is based on the idea to realize interworking between the two standards considered among the reference ones in the industrial and IoT domains. They are the OPC UA for the industrial domain and oneM2M for the IoT. Interworking is realized in such a way to allow industrial applications based on OPC UA to acquire information coming from oneM2M-based IoT devices. The proposal allows an OPC UA Server to publish each piece of information produced by oneM2M-based IoT devices, so that this information may be consumed by industrial applications playing the OPC UA Client role

Semantic Driven Approach for Rapid Application Development in Industrial Internet of Things

The evolution of IoT has revolutionized industrial automation. Industrial devices at every level such as field devices, control devices, enterprise level devices etc., are connected to the Internet, where they can be accessed easily. It has significantly changed the way applications are developed on the industrial automation systems. It led to the paradigm shift where novel IoT application development tools such as Node-RED can be used to develop complex industrial applications as IoT orchestrations. However, in the current state, these applications are bound strictly to devices from specific vendors and ecosystems. They cannot be re-used with devices from other vendors and platforms, since the applications are not semantically interoperable. For this purpose, it is desirable to use platform-independent, vendor-neutral application templates for common automation tasks. However, in the current state in Node-RED such reusable and interoperable application templates cannot be developed. The interoperability problem at the data level can be addressed in IoT, using Semantic Web (SW) technologies. However, for an industrial engineer or an IoT application developer, SW technologies are not very easy to use. In order to enable efficient use of SW technologies to create interoperable IoT applications, novel IoT tools are required. For this purpose, in this paper we propose a novel semantic extension to the widely used Node-RED tool by introducing semantic definitions such as iot.schema.org semantic models into Node-RED. The tool guides a non-expert in semantic technologies such as a device vendor, a machine builder to configure the semantics of a device consistently. Moreover, it also enables an engineer, IoT application developer to design and develop semantically interoperable IoT applications with minimal effort. Our approach accelerates the application development process by introducing novel semantic application templates called Recipes in Node-RED. Using Recipes, complex application development tasks such as skill matching between Recipes and existing things can be automated.We will present the approach to perform automated skill matching on the Cloud or on the Edge of an automation system. We performed quantitative and qualitative evaluation of our approach to test the feasibility and scalability of the approach in real world scenarios. The results of the evaluation are presented and discussed in the paper.Die Entwicklung des Internet der Dinge (IoT) hat die industrielle Automatisierung revolutioniert. Industrielle Geräte auf allen Ebenen wie Feldgeräte, Steuergeräte, Geräte auf Unternehmensebene usw. sind mit dem Internet verbunden, wodurch problemlos auf sie zugegriffen werden kann. Es hat die Art und Weise, wie Anwendungen auf industriellen Automatisierungssystemen entwickelt werden, deutlich verändert. Es führte zum Paradigmenwechsel, wo neuartige IoT Anwendungsentwicklungstools, wie Node-RED, verwendet werden können, um komplexe industrielle Anwendungen als IoT-Orchestrierungen zu entwickeln. Aktuell sind diese Anwendungen jedoch ausschließlich an Geräte bestimmter Anbieter und Ökosysteme gebunden. Sie können nicht mit Geräten anderer Anbieter und Plattformen verbunden werden, da die Anwendungen nicht semantisch interoperabel sind. Daher ist es wünschenswert, plattformunabhängige, herstellerneutrale Anwendungsvorlagen für allgemeine Automatisierungsaufgaben zu verwenden. Im aktuellen Status von Node-RED können solche wiederverwendbaren und interoperablen Anwendungsvorlagen jedoch nicht entwickelt werden. Diese Interoperabilitätsprobleme auf Datenebene können im IoT mithilfe von Semantic Web (SW) -Technologien behoben werden. Für Ingenieure oder Entwickler von IoT-Anwendungen sind SW-Technologien nicht sehr einfach zu verwenden. Zur Erstellung interoperabler IoT-Anwendungen sind daher neuartige IoT-Tools erforderlich. Zu diesem Zweck schlagen wir eine neuartige semantische Erweiterung des weit verbreiteten Node-RED-Tools vor, indem wir semantische Definitionen wie iot.schema.org in die semantischen Modelle von NODE-Red einführen. Das Tool leitet einen Gerätehersteller oder Maschinebauer, die keine Experten in semantische Technologien sind, an um die Semantik eines Geräts konsistent zu konfigurieren. Darüber hinaus ermöglicht es auch einem Ingenieur oder IoT-Anwendungsentwickler, semantische, interoperable IoT-Anwendungen mit minimalem Aufwand zu entwerfen und entwicklen Unser Ansatz beschleunigt die Anwendungsentwicklungsprozesse durch Einführung neuartiger semantischer Anwendungsvorlagen namens Rezepte für Node-RED. Durch die Verwendung von Rezepten können komplexe Anwendungsentwicklungsaufgaben wie das Abgleichen von Funktionen zwischen Rezepten und vorhandenen Strukturen automatisiert werden. Wir demonstrieren Skill-Matching in der Cloud oder am Industrial Edge eines Automatisierungssystems. Wir haben dafür quantitative und qualitative Bewertung unseres Ansatzes durchgeführt, um die Machbarkeit und Skalierbarkeit des Ansatzes in realen Szenarien zu testen. Die Ergebnisse der Bewertung werden in dieser Arbeit vorgestellt und diskutiert

Assessing and augmenting SCADA cyber security: a survey of techniques

SCADA systems monitor and control critical infrastructures of national importance such as power generation and distribution, water supply, transportation networks, and manufacturing facilities. The pervasiveness, miniaturisations and declining costs of internet connectivity have transformed these systems from strictly isolated to highly interconnected networks. The connectivity provides immense benefits such as reliability, scalability and remote connectivity, but at the same time exposes an otherwise isolated and secure system, to global cyber security threats. This inevitable transformation to highly connected systems thus necessitates effective security safeguards to be in place as any compromise or downtime of SCADA systems can have severe economic, safety and security ramifications. One way to ensure vital asset protection is to adopt a viewpoint similar to an attacker to determine weaknesses and loopholes in defences. Such mind sets help to identify and fix potential breaches before their exploitation. This paper surveys tools and techniques to uncover SCADA system vulnerabilities. A comprehensive review of the selected approaches is provided along with their applicability

Service-oriented architecture for device lifecycle support in industrial automation

Dissertação para obtenção do Grau de Doutor em Engenharia Electrotécnica e de Computadores Especialidade: Robótica e Manufactura IntegradaThis thesis addresses the device lifecycle support thematic in the scope of service oriented industrial automation domain. This domain is known for its plethora of heterogeneous equipment encompassing distinct functions, form factors, network interfaces, or I/O specifications supported by dissimilar software and hardware platforms. There is then an evident and crescent need to take every device into account and improve the agility performance during setup, control, management, monitoring and diagnosis phases. Service-oriented Architecture (SOA) paradigm is currently a widely endorsed approach for both business and enterprise systems integration. SOA concepts and technology are continuously spreading along the layers of the enterprise organization envisioning a unified interoperability solution. SOA promotes discoverability, loose coupling, abstraction, autonomy and composition of services relying on open web standards – features that can provide an important contribution to the industrial automation domain. The present work seized industrial automation device level requirements, constraints and needs to determine how and where can SOA be employed to solve some of the existent difficulties. Supported by these outcomes, a reference architecture shaped by distributed, adaptive and composable modules is proposed. This architecture will assist and ease the role of systems integrators during reengineering-related interventions throughout system lifecycle. In a converging direction, the present work also proposes a serviceoriented device model to support previous architecture vision and goals by including embedded added-value in terms of service-oriented peer-to-peer discovery and identification, configuration, management, as well as agile customization of device resources. In this context, the implementation and validation work proved not simply the feasibility and fitness of the proposed solution to two distinct test-benches but also its relevance to the expanding domain of SOA applications to support device lifecycle in the industrial automation domain

A layered middleware for ot/it convergence to empower industry 5.0 applications

We are still in the midst of Industry 4.0 (I4.0), with more manufacturing lines being labeled as smart thanks to the integration of advanced ICT in Cyber–Physical Systems (CPS). While I4.0 aims to provision cognitive CPS systems, the nascent Industry 5.0 (I5.0) era goes a step beyond, aiming to build cross-border, sustainable, and circular value chains benefiting society as a whole. An enabler of this vision is the integration of data and AI in the industrial decision-making process, which does not exhibit yet a coordination between the Operation and Information Technology domains (OT/IT). This work proposes an architectural approach and an accompanying software prototype addressing the OT/IT convergence problem. The approach is based on a two-layered middleware solution, where each layer aims to better serve the specific differentiated requirements of the OT and IT layers. The proposal is validated in a real testbed, employing actual machine data, showing the capacity of the components to gracefully scale and serve increasing data volumes

OPC UA integration through connect bridge platform

Ao longo das últimas décadas, o problema da integração de software tem representado um enorme desafio para as empresas devido aos elevados custos que lhe estão associados. Na década de 90, de modo a maximizar o seu lucro, os produtores de máquinas industriais dificultavam a comunicação entre máquinas de diferentes fabricantes, forçando assim a que fabricas tivessem de comprar todas as suas máquinas a um único fabricante. O padrão OPC surgiu nesta década e levou a que este problema fosse minimizado. Mais tarde, este standard foi atualizado, originando o OPC UA. Hoje vivemos a quarta revolução industrial e o OPC UA é considerado como o standard de facto para a mesma. A Connecting Software é uma empresa que se especializou no desenvolvimento de soluções de integração e através da sua plataforma, o Connect Bridge, simplificam as API de sistemas complexos com recurso a linguagem SQL. O Connect Bridge conta com uma arquitetura de plugins1 onde cada plugin que lhe é acoplado permite que este comunique com um sistema diferente. Assim, de modo a permitir que este comunique com sistemas baseados em OPC UA é necessário desenvolver um plugin1. Esta dissertação propõe a implementação deste plugin. Para construir o produto proposto, foi necessário: Compreender o padrão OPC UA e criar todos os requisitos para o sistema; Mapear o padrão OPC UA em SQL; Construir testes de integração; Além destes passos, houve a oportunidade de interação com um cliente. Esta colaboração permitiu refinar cenários e construir aplicações que serão utilizadas em futuras demonstrações do produto. O produto desenvolvido ao longo desta dissertação permitiu a entrada da Connecting Software num novo sector de mercado, o sector industrial, permitindo a integração de máquinas industriais que fazem do OPC UA Standard com outros sistemas suportados pela plataforma.Over the last decades, the problem of software integration has been a significant challenge for companies, due to high costs. In the 1990s, to maximize their profit, manufacturers of industrial machines created barriers to communication between machines from different manufacturers, forcing factories to buy all their machines from a single manufacturer. The OPC standard arose in this decade as a tentative to minimize this problem. Later, this standard was updated and OPC UA was born. Nowadays, we are living the fourth industrial revolution and OPC UA is considered as the de-facto standard for it. Connecting Software is a company specialized in the development of integration solutions. Through Connect Bridge, their integration platform, SQL is used to simplify complex system APIs. Connect Bridge uses a plugin architecture, where each plugin2 that is attached to it is used to allow the communication with a different system. This dissertation proposes a new connector used to allow Connect Bridge Platform to communicate with OPC UA systems. To achieve this result, it was necessary to: Understand the OPC UA Standard and create requirements; Map the OPC UA Standard into SQL; Implement the OPC UA Connector; Produce integration Tests. The integration tests allowed us to increase the overall value of the product, minimizing the occurrence of potential failures. During the development of this solution, there was the opportunity to interact with a friendly customer. This collaboration allowed us to create scenarios and develop simple demos which would be used to present to future customers. This product allowed Connecting Software to enter in a new market area, facilitating the integration of business-oriented systems (e.g. SharePoint, Exchange or others) with industrial systems based on OPC UA

Replacing internal communication protocol in UNIC control system

This thesis examines OPC-UA (Open Platform Communications Unified Architecture) and investigate how it could be used in Wärtsilä for performing internal communication on their UNIC engine control system. Features of OPC-UA are compared to the currently used in-house built protocol to find out if changing the protocol would be feasible. OPC-UA is a communication specification that standardizes information exchange of industrial automation. This thesis introduces the key concepts of the specification such as information modelling, client-server communication model, publish-subscribe communication model, and the available transportation mappings defining the concrete protocols for transportation. In addition, the current communication implementation of the control system and the services provided for system software components are inspected. After inspections, a general mapping is made between the currently provided services and the OPC-UA features. It is also discussed what transportation protocols shall be chosen for OPC-UA. The objective of the thesis is to list requirements for performing internal communication by using OPC-UA. Requirements are set for the OPC-UA software development kit features based on the mapped services and protocols. The mapped protocols also introduce requirements for the network stack of the platform software. Based on the feature mappings an architectural proposal for OPC-UA implementation on the control system is presented. It is shown how the different OPC-UA software components could be distributed between the different hardware modules of the system, how the information model and communication interfaces could be initialized in the source code, and how the servers of the different hardware modules could be aggregated into a single server. It is also presented how the information model of the control system could be structured. A short performance comparison is performed by comparing the data frame structure of the current implementation and the mapped counterpart. Finally, it is concluded that in theory OPC UA is feasible for performing the internal communication as it provides a lot of options for implementing the tasks of the current service handlers, but in practice the change contains some risks such as immaturity of the technology. Furthermore, the change would require a lot of work, and it could be questioned if the business value of the protocol change is worth the investment.Tässä opinnäytetyössä tarkastellaan OPC-UA:ta (Open Platform Communications Unified Architecture), ja selvitetään miten OPC-UA-tiedonsiirtoa voitaisiin käyttää Wärstilän UNIC-moottorinohjausjärjestelmän sisäisen tiedonsiirron suorittamiseen. OPC-UA ominaisuuksia verrataan tällä hetkellä käytössä olevaan yrityksen itse valmistamaan protokollaan, jotta saadaan selville, olisiko protokollan vaihtaminen mahdollista. OPC-UA on tietoliikennespesifikaatio, joka standardoi teollisen automaation tiedonvaihdon. Tässä opinnäytetyössä esitellään spesifikaation keskeisimmät käsitteet kuten tiedon mallintaminen, asiakas-palvelin-viestintämalli, julkaise-tilaa-viestintämalli sekä käytettävissä olevat tiedon siirtomenetelmät, jotka määrittelevät konkreettiset tiedonsiirtoon käytettävät protokollat. Tarkasteltavana on myös ohjausjärjestelmän nykyinen viestintätoteutus ja sen tarjoamat palvelut järjestelmän eri ohjelmistokomponenteille. Tarkastusten jälkeen tehdään yleinen kartoitus tämänhetkisten palvelujen ja OPC-UA:n ominaisuuksien välille. Opinnäytetyön tavoitteena on listata vaatimukset sisäisen viestinnän suorittamiselle OPC-UA:n avulla. Käytettävälle OPC-UA-ohjelmistokehityspaketille asetetaan vaatimukset kartoitettujen palvelujen ja protokollien perusteella. OPC-UA:n tarjoamat protokollat asettavat myös vaatimuksia alustaohjelmiston verkkopinolle. Ominaisuuskartoitusten perusteella esitetään myös arkkitehtoninen ehdotelma OPC-UA:n toteuttamiselle ohjausjärjestelmässä. Ehdotelma osoittaa, kuinka eri OPC-UA-ohjelmistokomponentit voitaisiin jakaa järjestelmän eri laitteistomoduulien kesken, miten tietomalli ja tietoliikennerajapinnat voidaan alustaa lähdekoodissa ja kuinka eri moduulien palvelimet voitaisiin yhdistää yhdeksi palvelimeksi. Lisäksi esitetään miten järjestelmän tietomalli voisi rakentua. Lyhyt teoreettinen suorituskykyvertailu suoritetaan vertaamalla nykyisen toteutuksen datakehysrakennetta ja kartoitettua vastinetta. Lopuksi todetaan, että teoriassa OPC-UA on käyttökelpoinen sisäisen viestinnän suorittamiseen, koska se tarjoaa paljon vaihtoehtoja nykyisten palvelunkäsittelijöiden tehtävien toteuttamiseen. Käytännössä muutokseen sisältyy kuitenkin riskejä, kuten tekniikan tuoreuteen liittyvä epäkypsyys. Muutos vaatisi paljon työtä ja protokollamuutoksen tuottama liikearvo on hieman kyseenalainen verrattuna vaadittuun investointiin

Plant-wide interoperability and decoupled, data-driven process control with message bus communication

Conventional industrial communication systems suffer from rigidness, inflexibility and lack of scalability. The environment is heterogeneous as the systems exchange data with a variety communication protocols, some of which are proprietary. This makes it laborious and expensive to reconfigure or upgrade the systems. As the solution, this article proposes a message-bus-based communication architecture to enable information exchange between systems regardless of their geographical location and position within the functional hierarchy of the plant. The architecture not only enables communication to cross the conventional physical borders but also provides scalability to growing data volumes and network sizes. As proofs of concept, the article presents a prototype in three environments: a copper smelter, a steel plant and a distillation column. The results suggest that the message-bus-based approach has potential to renew industrial communications, a core part of the fourth industrial revolution.H2020, 723661, COCO

Tying Together Solutions for Digital Manufacturing: Assessment of Connectivity Technologies & Approaches

This paper concerns the development of low-cost solutions to address challenges in digital manufacturing (DM). Service Oriented Architectures (SOAs) are a promising approach for addressing the requirements of a low-cost DM architecture. Interaction between services in a SOA is facilitated by a connectivity technology, i.e., a framework for interoperable data exchange between heterogeneous participants. We review a variety of connectivity technologies according to their suitability for use in an SME manufacturer’s production environment, and we assess how they have been integrated into past architectures. We then provide insights into an incremental and modular architecture for manufacturing SMEs.Digital Manufacturing on a Shoestring [Digital Shoestring]. EPSRC Reference: EP/R032777/1