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

The Semantic Web 10

Edge computing proposes a novel model for providing computational resources close to end devices that are connected to the network. It has numerous applications in Internet of Things, as well as smart grids, healthcare, smart home, etc. This paper presents ongoing research regarding the use of blockchain technology as a platform hierarchical and distributed control systems based on IEC 61499 standard. Hyperledger Fabric was selected as the blockchain solution, where function blocks are to be implemented as smart contracts on a supervisor level. The integration with the edge nodes that perform on the executive level responsible for actual process control is based on a micro-services architecture where Docker containers implement function blocks, and Kubernetes platform is used for orchestrating the execution of containers across the edge resources.

Blockchain Based Distributed Control System for Edge Computing

Foreseeing changes in the way companies manufacture products and provide services, future trends are emerging in design and manufacture. Together with growing internet applications and technologies connected through the cloud, a new Industrial Revolution, named “Industry 4.0”, aims to integrate cyber-virtual and cyber-physical systems to aid smart manufacturing, as presented in this paper. Connecting information and physical machinery, this new paradigm relies on how effective and fast connectivity are achieved for Industry 4.0. A new generation of wireless connection, 5G, will help and accelerate this trend. Following analysis of the present cyber-physical integration for the 4th Industrial Revolution, this paper also investigates future methodologies and trends in smart manufacturing, design and innovation.

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Industry 4.0 with cyber-physical integration: A design and manufacture perspective

Information and communication technologies are permeating all aspects of industrial and manufacturing systems, expediting the generation of large volumes of industrial data. This paper surveys the recent literature on data management as it applies to networked industrial environments and identifies several open research challenges for the future. As a first step, we extract important data properties (volume, variety, traffic, and criticality) and identify the corresponding data enabling technologies of diverse fundamental industrial use cases, based on practical applications. Second, we provide a detailed outline of recent industrial architectural designs with respect to their data management philosophy (data presence, data coordination, and data computation) and the extent of their distributiveness. Then, we conduct a holistic survey of the recent literature from which we derive a taxonomy of the latest advances in industrial data enabling technologies and data centric services, spanning all the way from the field level deep in the physical deployments, up to the cloud and applications level. Finally, motivated by the rich conclusions of this critical analysis, we identify interesting open challenges for future research. The concepts presented in this paper thematically cover the largest part of the industrial automation pyramid layers. Our approach is multidisciplinary, as the selected publications were drawn from two fields; the communications, networking and computation field, and the industrial, manufacturing, and automation field. This paper can help the readers to deeply understand how data management is currently applied in networked industrial environments, and select interesting open research opportunities to pursue.

Data Management in Industry 4.0: State of the Art and Open Challenges

A computer system and process is provided to generate computer programming code, such as in a Software Development Kit (SDK) The SDK generated allows an application to use a given API An API description interface of the system is operable to receive API-description code describing one or more endpoints of the API A template interface is operable to receive one or more templates of code defining classes and/or functions in a programming language which can be selected by the selection of a set of templates A data store is operable to use a defined data structure to store records of API description code to provide a structured stored description of the API A code generation module is operable to combine records of API with templates of code which are arranged in sets by the language of the code they contain The combining of records and code from templates may use pointers to a data structure which is common to corresponding templates in different sets to allow templates of selected languages to be combined with any API description stored

Automatch process and system for software development kit for application programming interface

The IEC 61499 standard enables the model-based design of complex industrial automation systems, in which a model of the controlled physical processes called a plant, is codeveloped with the controller However, the existing design flow does not address functional safety issues, which include limiting risk to acceptable levels Standards like IEC 61508 provide safety guidelines for measuring and managing risk to acceptable ranges using quantitative or probabilistic methods for hardware, and qualitative or systematic analysis techniques for software Such analyses are inadequate in situations where safety depends on both hardware and software This paper proposes a unifying model-based approach for the quantitative and qualitative analysis of IEC 61499 designs The approach combines Markov analysis and model checking to estimate quantified risk and is more expressive than traditional analyses like reliability block diagrams At design level, unified safety requirements are captured using safety blocks, which is an extension of the IEC 61499 basic blocks The PRISM model checker is used to analyze the system, based on a sound conversion of IEC 61499 designs into PRISM models A tool-chain enabling the proposed approach shows encouraging benchmarking results confirming the feasibility of unified analysis

Unified Functional Safety Assessment of Industrial Automation Systems

IEC 61499 is an international standard for designing Industrial Process Control Systems using artefacts such as Function Blocks and Execution Control Charts. The existing approaches towards formal verification of function blocks lack the natural expression for specifying the system properties. We suggest an approach for performing formal verification of IEC 61499 designs using observers expressed as function blocks. This method provides the IEC 61499 designer with an intuitive way of expressing system properties and also makes the verification result easier to map to the original design. We have implemented two different algorithms, a tableau based CTL model checker and a reachability analyzer, to support the verification of observers. Experimental evaluation over a range of benchmarks have shown better performance as compared to Esterel based verification in terms of computation time.

Observer based verification of IEC 61499 function blocks

This book describes a novel approach for the design of embedded systems and industrial automation systems, using a unified model-driven approach that is applicable in both domains. The authors illustrate their methodology, using the IEC 61499 standard as the main vehicle for specification, verification, static timing analysis and automated code synthesis. The well-known synchronous approach is used as the main vehicle for defining an unambiguous semantics that ensures determinism and deadlock freedom. The proposed approach also ensures very efficient implementations either on small-scale embedded devices or on industry-scale programmable automation controllers (PACs). It can be used for both centralized and distributed implementations. Significantly, the proposed approach can be used without the need for any run-time support. This approach, for the first time, blurs the gap between embedded systems and automation systems and can be applied in wide-ranging applications in automotive, robotics, and industrial control systems. Several realistic examples are used to demonstrate for readers how the methodology can enable them to reduce the time-to-market, while improving the design quality and productivity.

Zeeshan E. Bhatti

Papers

Automatch process and system for software development kit for application programming interface

Unified Functional Safety Assessment of Industrial Automation Systems

Observer based verification of IEC 61499 function blocks

Model-Driven Design Using IEC 61499: A Synchronous Approach for Embedded and Automation Systems

Model-Driven Design Using IEC 61499