Project Overview
One of the arguments for an Internet of Things (IoT) is allowing devices, machines, and objects to interact with each other without relying on human intervention to set-up and commission the embedded intelligence. IoT@Work is an EU project led by Siemens AG running within the ICT research programme. The project focuses on harnessing IoT technologies in industrial and automation environments. It will use the FIAT Research Centre facilities (as part of the largest industrial company in Italy) to develop an IoT-based plug and work concept centered on industrial automation. The consortium also includes several distinguished researchers from City University London, Lemgo‘s Institut Industrial IT (inIT), European Microsoft Innovation Centre (EMIC), and TXT-e Solutions.
The designers of industrial automation systems have always faced the challenge of configuring a highly complex and demanding communication network as well as an IT security subsystem. This costly and often manual effort is critical in order to avoid failures that can lead to costly production interruptions (a FIAT factory produces a car each minute) or malfunction that can endanger involved humans.
Benefits
IoT@Work aims at designing an IoT architecture that takes the industry and factory automation systems and their networking and communication needs into account, while focusing on the auto-configuration and security to allow a both true flexibility and reliability through what we call plug and work IoT.
An IoT@Work enabled factory shop floor should make the life of an automation expert or engineer easier as well as reduce operative and capital expenditure. During the design and commissioning phases of the machines, i.e. the automation devices, sensors and actuators, which are further developing to become Internet-enabled things, the automation expert will not have to care of configuring the bits and bytes exchanged between these things. He/she will not have to configure network protocols for switches and routers or assign the IP addresses to the different automation devices. Instead, the self-configuring Internet of Things (IoT) will hide most of the complexity of network protocols that are needed to assign a “networking” address to a device or to transfer configuration data to a device.
Project Objectives
The goal of the IoT@Work project is to reduce operational costs in configuring, commissioning, and maintaining manufacturing solutions mainly by targeting disruption times due to reconfigurations or all types of changes to the system. Building on the results of current research projects, we focus on enhancing the current communication and middleware infrastructure, so as to construct new self-managing and resilient networks and middleware and service oriented application architectures that are well adapted for use in a factory environment. The outcome will be open interface specifications and protocols, which will be validated through a proof-of-concept prototype implementation applied on a small scale industrial process that will reflect many of the challenges faced in large scale factory processes.
The main technical objectives of the project are centred around the following goals:
- Decoupling automation application/controller programming from network configuration and operation in order to:
- Reduce the effects of process and application reconfiguration on the amount of manual planning required at the network level.
- Provide advanced communication services that fulfill application demands in terms of reliability, real-time, scalability, and security.
- Integrate more self-management in a plug and work network in order to:
- Enable Plug&Work at all levels especially during the configuration phase of industrial automation networks.
- Take application semantics and work-flows into account when structuring and optimizing the network operation.
- Ensuring resilience and security in running automation systems in order to:
- Support adaptive and agile manufacturing scenarios while securing and protecting the reliability and resilience of running systems.
- Integrate strong security mechanisms at the architectural level and avoid unauthorized access to and unwanted interference with the production process.
