With the introduction of the Internet of Things (IoT) and cyberphysical system (CPS) concepts in industrial application scenarios, industrial automation is undergoing a tremendous change. This is made possible in part by recent advances in technology that allow interconnection on a wider and more fine-grained scale. The purpose of this article is to review technological trends and the impact they may have on industrial communication. We will review the impact of IoT and CPSs on industrial automation from an industry 4.0 perspective, give a survey of the current state of work on Ethernet time-sensitive networking (TSN), and shed light on the role of fifth-generation (5G) telecom networks in automation. Moreover, we will point out the need for harmonization beyond networking.

The Future of Industrial Communication: Automation Networks in the Era of the Internet of Things and Industry 4.0

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This paper discusses about integrating renewable energy sources into the smart power grid through industrial electronics. This paper discusses photovoltaic power, wind energy conversion, hybrid energy systems, and tidal energy conversion.

Future Energy Systems: Integrating Renewable Energy Sources into the Smart Power Grid Through Industrial Electronics

With the developments and applications of the new information technologies, such as cloud computing, Internet of Things, big data, and artificial intelligence, a smart manufacturing era is coming. At the same time, various national manufacturing development strategies have been put forward, such as Industry 4.0 , Industrial Internet , manufacturing based on Cyber-Physical System , and Made in China 2025 . However, one of specific challenges to achieve smart manufacturing with these strategies is how to converge the manufacturing physical world and the virtual world, so as to realize a series of smart operations in the manufacturing process, including smart interconnection, smart interaction, smart control and management, etc. In this context, as a basic unit of manufacturing, shop-floor is required to reach the interaction and convergence between physical and virtual spaces, which is not only the imperative demand of smart manufacturing, but also the evolving trend of itself. Accordingly, a novel concept of digital twin shop-floor (DTS) based on digital twin is explored and its four key components are discussed, including physical shop-floor, virtual shop-floor, shop-floor service system, and shop-floor digital twin data. What is more, the operation mechanisms and implementing methods for DTS are studied and key technologies as well as challenges ahead are investigated, respectively.

Digital Twin Shop-Floor: A New Shop-Floor Paradigm Towards Smart Manufacturing

With the success of wireless technologies in consumer electronics, standard wireless technologies are envisioned for the deployment in industrial environments as well. Industrial applications involving mobile subsystems or just the desire to save cabling make wireless technologies attractive. Nevertheless, these applications often have stringent requirements on reliability and timing. In wired environments, timing and reliability are well catered for by fieldbus systems (which are a mature technology designed to enable communication between digital controllers and the sensors and actuators interfacing to a physical process). When wireless links are included, reliability and timing requirements are significantly more difficult to meet, due to the adverse properties of the radio channels. In this paper, we thus discuss some key issues coming up in wireless fieldbus and wireless industrial communication systems: 1) fundamental problems like achieving timely and reliable transmission despite channel errors; 2) the usage of existing wireless technologies for this specific field of applications; and 3) the creation of hybrid systems in which wireless stations are incorporated into existing wired systems.

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Wireless Technology in Industrial Networks

In order to obtain a highly reliable communications system, the development approach in terms of both services and protocols, must be suitably supported by appropriate specification tools that are able to provide complete, unambiguous and flexible description techniques. In most of communication applications the LOTOS language, among the standard formal description techniques, is widely used. An object oriented analysis is introduced to describe a specification method that can increase the specification accuracy while at the same time providing an efficient means for rapid prototyping. The article also shows the results of the proposed approach and describes a specific communication protocol, the controller area network (CAN), which is now being used in a broader class of applications within the factory automation process.

Communication service and protocol specification using object oriented analysis

Even though the controller area network (CAN) protocol is particularly suitable to support communications in real-time environments, it may exhibit unfair behaviour under heavy traffic conditions. Medium-utilisation state tracking (MUST) is a novel technique which achieves fair round-robin access in CANs and requires few changes to the original protocol. Furthermore, it preserves full compatibility with the existing devices and applications developed for CANs. In this paper, the combined use of conventional CAN and MUST devices is analysed, and the performance improvements which can be obtained have been evaluated. In addition, some hints are given on possible implementations of the MUST technique in real CAN controllers.

http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/iel5/7823/21505/00996373.pdf

Integrating the CAN and MUST access techniques in a single fieldbus

Distributed (networked) control systems where data exchanges have to satisfy real-time constraints could advantageously use centralized Medium Access Control schemes implementing priority-based scheduling strategies borrowed from the operating system domain. When considering lossy channels, as in the case of wireless networks, Automatic Repeat reQuest mechanisms are needed to ensure the required levels of reliability. As retransmissions impact on bandwidth consumption and introduce latency, adequate tradeoffs between reliability and timeliness have to be determined. Some solutions have been proposed in the recent past, aimed at helping designers in finding the best compromise under given system requirements. In this paper, we generalize them as a class of Deadline-Constrained Repeat reQuest mechanisms. Lower and upper bounds on the probability of delivering data successfully (i.e., correctly and timely), in spite of transmission errors, are computed for the entire class, under specific channel conditions. These results may help designers in assessing the advantages of each solution.

Deadline-Constrained Repeat reQuest mechanisms for wireless communication channels

This paper introduces an ongoing project aimed at using object oriented modeling as a complete and flexible technique to describe and analyze protocols and distributed applications. In particular, a description of the FIP fieldbus protocol is presented indicating the approach which is to be followed so that it can be expressed in a complete and unambiguous way in order to ensure performance evaluation, and rapid prototyping. Fieldbus issues are first discussed and then the object oriented approach for protocol specification is considered in detail describing the specification of the FIP protocol. Particular attention has been paid to the definition of a model suited to the representation of time constraints and for this purpose a concurrent object model has been used. >

An object oriented model for the FIP protocol

By removing wire harness, Wi-Fi is becoming increasingly pervasive in every aspect of our lives, in both the consumer and industrial worlds. Besides flexibility, the recent high efficiency and extremely high throughput versions managed to close the performance gap with Ethernet. However, it still lags behind Ethernet for what concerns dependability. To this aim, the ultra high reliability study group has been recently formed. This paper reports on some preliminary ideas and proposals about the ways seamless redundancy can be exploited to make Wi-Fi more reliable, yet retaining a good degree of backward compatibility with existing network infrastructures.

Gianluca Cena

Papers

Communication service and protocol specification using object oriented analysis

Integrating the CAN and MUST access techniques in a single fieldbus

Deadline-Constrained Repeat reQuest mechanisms for wireless communication channels

An object oriented model for the FIP protocol

Seamless Redundancy for High Reliability Wi-Fi