Armando W. Colombo

Industrial Cloud-Based Cyber-Physical Systems: The IMC-AESOP Approach

This book presents cutting-edge emerging technologies and approaches in the areas of service-oriented architectures, intelligent devices and cloud-based cyber-physical systems. It provides a clear view on their applicability to the management and automation of manufacturing and process industries. It offers a holistic view of future industrial cyber-physical systems and their industrial usage and also depicts technologies and architectures as well as a migration approach and engineering tools based on these. By providing a careful balance between the theory and the practical aspects, this book has been authored by several experts from academia and industry, thereby offering a valuable understanding of the vision, the domain, the processes and the results of the research. It has several illustrations and tables to clearly exemplify the concepts and results examined in the text and these are supported by four real-life case-studies. We are witnessing rapid advances in the industrial automation, mainly driven by business needs towards agility and supported by new disruptive advances both on the software and hardware side, as well as the cross-fertilization of concepts and the amalgamation of information and communication technology-driven approaches in traditional industrial automation and control systems. This book is intended for technology managers, application designers, solution developers, engineers working in industry, as well as researchers, undergraduate and graduate students of industrial automation, industrial informatics and production engineering.

Service-Oriented Infrastructure to Support the Deployment of Evolvable Production Systems

Nowadays, Service-oriented Architecture (SOA) paradigm is becoming a broadly deployed standard for business and enterprise integration. It continuously spreads across the diverse layers of the enterprise organization and disparate domains of application envisioning a unified communication solution. In the industrial domain, Evolvable Production System (EPS) paradigm focus on the identification of guidelines and solutions to support the design, operation, maintenance, and evolution of complete industrial infrastructures. Similarly to several other domains, the crescent ubiquity of smart devices is raising important lifecycle concerns such as device setup, control, management, supervision and diagnosis. From initial setup and deployment to system lifecycle monitoring and evolution, each device needs to be taken into account and easily reachable. The present work exploits the association of EPS and SOA paradigms in the pursuit of a common architectural solution to support the different phases of the device lifecycle. The result is a modular, adaptive and open infrastructure forming a complete SOA ecosystem that will make use of the embedded capabilities supported by the proposed device model. The infrastructure components are specified and it is shown how they can interact and be combined to adapt to current system specificity and requirements. Finally, a proof-of-concept prototype deployed in a real industrial production scenario is also detailed and results are presented.

Industrial automation based on cyber-physical systems technologies

Roadmap for the development of industrial cyber-physical systems.Description of 4 prototype implementations for industrial automation based on cyber-physical systems technologies.Overview of key CPS challenges to increase Technology Readiness Levels. Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) is an emergent approach that focuses on the integration of computational applications with physical devices, being designed as a network of interacting cyber and physical elements. CPS control and monitor real-world physical infrastructures and thus is starting having a high impact in industrial automation. As such design, implementation and operation of CPS and management of the resulting automation infrastructure is of key importance for the industry. In this work, an overview of key aspects of industrial CPS, their technologies and emerging directions, as well as challenges for their implementation is presented. Based on the hands-on experiences gathered from four European innovation projects over the last decade (i.e. SOCRADES, IMC-AESOP, GRACE and ARUM), a key challenges have been identified and a prioritization and timeline are pointed out with the aim to increase Technology Readiness Levels and lead to their usage in industrial automation environments.

SOA in reconfigurable supply chains: A research roadmap

Originally coming from the business world, service-oriented architecture (SOA) paradigm is expanding its range of application into several different environments. Industrial automation is increasingly interested on adopting it as a unifying approach with several advantages over traditional automation. In particular, the paradigm is well indicated to support agile and reconfigurable supply chains due to its dynamic nature. In this domain, the main goals are short time-to-market, fast application (re)configurability, more intelligent devices with lifecycle support, technology openness, seamless IT integration, etc. The current research challenges associated to the application of SOA into reconfigurable supply chains are enumerated and detailed with the aim of providing a roadmap into a major adoption of SOA to support agile reconfigurable supply chains.

Architecting the next generation of service-based SCADA/DCS system of systems

SCADA and DCS systems are in the heart of the modern industrial infrastructure. The rapid changes in the networked embedded systems and the way industrial applications are designed and implemented, call for a shift in the architectural paradigm. Next generation SCADA and DCS systems will be able to foster cross-layer collaboration with the shop-floor devices as well as in-network and enterprise applications. Ecosystems driven by (web) service based interactions will enable stronger coupling of real-world and the business side, leading to a new generation of monitoring and control applications and services witnessed as the integration of large-scale systems of systems that are constantly evolving to address new user needs.

ADACOR: a collaborative production automation and control architecture

Manufacturers are under enormous pressure to comply with market changes and the continual shortening of product life cycles. An analysis of the ADACOR collaborative manufacturing control architecture from the point of view of the Collaborative Manufacturing Management paradigm shows how ADACOR (adaptive holonic control architecture for distributed manufacturing system) supports integration and extension across the manufacturing value chain.

SOA at device level in the industrial domain: Assessment of OPC UA and DPWS specifications

Service-oriented Architecture (SOA) is increasingly relevant across several domains of application by promising systems openness and unification over a common design and communication paradigm. At device level, the application of SOA is carried, on one hand, by Devices Profile for Web Services (DPWS) and complementary web-based specifications oriented towards resource management, and, on the other hand, by OPC Unified Architecture (OPC UA) framework. These are currently the major candidates to be deployed at device level in a service-oriented industrial scenario. This document offers an overlook over both approaches, along with some complementary WS-* specifications through an extensive technical assessment. Also, it illustrates that neither one of these specifications can alone entirely cope with the requirements of service-oriented industrial domain device level and that a combined approach promises to deliver an important contribution. Synergies between the two sets of specifications for a more conformant solution are identified, and a convergence approach is enunciated in an era where it is imperative to avoid unnecessary layers of integration across enterprise infrastructure to ensure a more agile, lean and sustainable development.

A SOA-based architecture for empowering future collaborative cloud-based industrial automation

The last years we are witnessing of rapid advances in the industrial automation domain, mainly driven by business needs towards agility and supported by new disruptive technologies. Future factories will rely on multi-system interactions and collaborative cross-layer management and automation approaches. Such a factory, configured and managed from architectural and behavioural viewpoints, under the service-oriented architecture (SOA) paradigm is virtualized by services exposed by its key components (both HW and SW). One of the main results of this virtualization is that the factory is transformed into a “cloud of services”, where dynamic resource allocation and interactions take place. This paper presents a view on such architecture, its specification, the main motivation and considerations, as well as the preliminary services it may need to support.

Towards an architecture for service-oriented process monitoring and control

The initiative AESOP (ArchitecturE for Service-Oriented Process-Monitoring and — Control) envisions a Service-oriented Architecture approach for monitoring and control of Process Control applications (batch and continuous process). Large process industry systems are a complex (potentially very large) set of (frequently) multi-disciplinary, connected, heterogeneous systems that function as a complex system of which the components are themselves systems. The future “Perfect Plant” will be able to seamlessly collaborate and enable monitoring and control information flow in a cross-layer way. As such the different systems will be part of an SCADA/DCS ecosystem, where components can be dynamically added or removed and dynamic discovery enables the on-demand information combination and collaboration. All current and future systems will be able to share information in a timely and open manner, enabling an enterprise-wide system of systems that will dynamically evolve based on business needs. The SOA-based approach proposed by AESOP can, on one hand, simplify the integration of monitoring and control systems on application layer. On the other hand, the networking technologies that are already known to control engineers could also simplify the inclusion of or migration from existing solutions and integration of the next generation SCADA and DCS systems at network layer.

Factory of the Future: A Service-oriented System of Modular, Dynamic Reconfigurable and Collaborative Systems

Modern enterprises operate on a global scale and depend on complex business processes performed in highly distributed production systems. Business continuity needs to be guaranteed, while changes at some or many of the distributed shop-floors should happen on-the-fly without stopping the production process as a whole. Unfortunately, there are limits and barriers that hinder the business requirements in beating tackled timely in the shop-floors due to missing modularity, agile reconfigurability, collaboration and open communication among the systems. However, as the number of sophisticated networked embedded devices in the shop-floors increases, service-oriented architecture (SOA) concepts can now be pushed down from the upper information technology level to the device level, and provide a better collaboration between the business systems and the production systems. This leads to highly modular, dynamic reconfigurable factories that build a collaborative system of systems that can adapt and optimize its behaviour to achieve the business goals. The work presented in this chapter shows directions to achieve this dynamism by means of SOA introduction in all layers, increased collaboration and close coupling of production sites and enterprise systems.