Armando Walter Colombo

Industrial Cyber–Physical Systems [Scanning the Issue]

The articles in this special issue present the latest developments and achievements in industrial cyber–physical systems (ICPSs). The papers in this issue cover key areas on architecture, design,enabling technologies, and applications of ICPSs. Additionally, they present emerging trends and visions of ICPSs for future investigations.

Engineering of Next Generation Cyber-Physical Automation System Architectures

Cyber-Physical-Systems (CPS) enable flexible and reconfigurable realization of automation system architectures, utilizing distributed control architectures with non-hierarchical modules linked together through different communication systems. Several control system architectures have been developed and validated in the past years by research groups. However, there is still a lack of implementation in industry. The intention of this work is to provide a summary of current alternative control system architectures that could be applied in industrial automation domain as well as a review of their commonalities. The aim is to point out the differences between the traditional centralized and hierarchical architectures to discussed ones, which rely on decentralized decision-making and control. Challenges and impacts that industries and engineers face in the process of adopting decentralized control architectures are discussed, analysing the obstacles for industrial acceptance and the new necessary interdisciplinary engineering skills. Finally, an outlook of possible mitigation and migration actions required to implement the decentralized control architectures is addressed.

Developing Interfaces Based on Services to the Cloud Manufacturing: Plug and Produce

In the last decade the industrial automation had been making important changes integrating Internet and other emergent technologies, concepts, methods and tools, as cloud computing and Service Oriented Architecture(SOA) approaches. As a first consequence, the industrial automation context is also increasing in complexity, presenting new challenges for engineers and managers. Examples include dealing with autonomous cyber physical systems, evolvable heterogeneous structures that do not appear completely formed and where functions and goal are added, removed or modified along the life cycle, as well as handling emergent properties and behaviours of entire systems, e.g. resulting from integrating new systems being not localized to any single system component. [1]. The objective of this paper is to make a review in industrial automation background, analyze the technological trends and challenges and propose a flexible and autoconfigurable service-oriented model, making up basis for the cloud manufacturing. In this model the entities are loosely coupled, due the fact that a service’s functionality communication is showed through its interfaces.

Benchmarking of existing OPC UA implementations for Industrie 4.0-compliant digitalization solutions

A standardized Communication / Information Protocol is necessary for implementing the 4 upper digitalization layers of Industrie 4.0-compliant solutions. OPC UA is one of the leading and preferred technology. Currently, there are many different OPC UA implementations available on the market. This paper gives an overview of existing solutions and shows the results of an initial benchmarking based on a set of evaluation criteria defined by the authors. Moreover, the manuscript identifies both free-of-charge and commercial solutions that are more adequate for implementing industrial applications.