Authors: Wenbin Dai; Paulo Leitão; Kim Fung Tsang; Yang Shi; Gerhard Hancke; Lei Shu; Moris Behnam; Jan Haase; Valeriy Vyatkin

Extended Abstract: The world is facing a series of new societal and industrial challenges such as continuously increasing costs in food and energy supply and short of skilled labor. To solve these new challenges, operation, information, and communication technologies are entering a new era with more focus target on cost reduction and energy savings. In this paper, To solve these new challenges, operation, information, and communication technologies are entering a new era with more focus target on cost reduction and energy savings as well as enabling a higher level of intelligence with the human-centric closed loop in consideration. Key technologies from operation, information, and communication domains for supporting digital and green transitions, including embedded virtualization, low-code development, digital twins, and industrial agents, are analyzed individually which covers the entire life cycle including the design, development, deployment and operation stage. In addition, the security and sustainability requirements of future industrial automation systems are analyzed. By applying virtualization technologies in IIoT, modeling the resource usage of services using different hardware, designing decision-making and control algorithms, and implementing solutions with low runtime overhead cloud largely reduces the cost of systems while keeping their robustness. The combined model-driven and data-driven approach can assist code generation processes by maintaining situational awareness of actual operators in the loop. Digital twins can assist large distributed control systems during the entire life cycle including the design, development and testing stages and the entire system can be verified before the actual hardware installation is completed by applying digital twin models. Industrial agents could be complemented with AI-based technologies to provide intelligence and decision-making, cloud and edge computing to accommodate agents running with different real-time constraints and communication infrastructures, and particularly IIoT technologies, to support the communication between the distributed control nodes implemented by agents. The synergies of all presented ICT research topics are enabling technologies of digital and green transitions through the design, development, deployment, and operation stages to achieve a smart, sustainable, human-centric, and resilient industry.

ICT on sustainability: applications, challenges, and outlooks (top) and OICT for digital and green transitions (bottom)

 

This paper has been published the Industrial Electronics Magazine in https://www.ieee-ies.org/pubs/industrial-electronics-magazine

Check full paper at: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/10293153