Smart manufacturing is a vision and major driver for change in today’s industry. The goal of smart manufacturing is to optimize manufacturing processes through constantly monitoring, controlling, and adapting processes towards more efficient and personalised manufacturing. This requires and relies on technologies for connected machines incorporating a variety of computation, sensing, actuation, and machine to machine communications modalities. As such, understanding the change towards smart manufacturing requires knowledge of the enabling technologies, their applications in real world scenarios and the communication protocols and their performance to meet application requirements. Particularly, wireless communication is becoming an integral part of modern smart manufacturing and is expected to play an important role in achieving the goals of smart manufacturing. This paper presents an extensive review of wireless communication protocols currently applied in manufacturing environments and provides a comprehensive review of the associated use cases whilst defining their expected impact on the future of smart manufacturing. Based on the review, we point out a number of open challenges and directions for future research in wireless communication technologies for smart manufacturing.

Time-sensitive networking (TSN) is expected to be a key component of critical machine-type communication networks in areas such as Industry 4.0, robotics and autonomous vehicles. With rising mobility requirements in industrial applications and the prevalence of wireless networks, wireless network integration into TSN is becoming increasingly important. This survey article presents a comprehensive review of the current literature on wireless TSN, including an overview of the architecture of a wireless TSN network and an examination of the various wireless technologies and protocols that can be or are used in such networks. In addition, the article discusses industrial applications of wireless TSN, among them industrial automation, robotics, and autonomous vehicles. The article concludes by summarizing the challenges and open issues related to the integration of TSN into wireless networks, and by offering suggestions for future research directions.

This paper explores the role that 5G, WiFi 7, and Time-Sensitive Networking (TSN) play in driving smart manufacturing as a fundamental part of the Industry 4.0 vision. It provides an in-depth analysis of each technology’s application in industrial communications, with a focus on TSN and its key elements that enable reliable and secure communication in industrial networks. In addition, this paper includes a comparative study of these technologies, analyzing them based on several industrial use cases, supported secondary applications, industry adoption, and current market trends. This paper concludes by highlighting the challenges and future directions for adopting these technologies in industrial networks and emphasizes their importance in realizing the Industry 4.0 vision within the context of smart manufacturing.

Automation systems involve a range of cyber-physical system components such as sensors, actuators, control equipment, machines, robots, AGVs, etc. Seamless interoperability among these entities is a significant challenge. A well-designed Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) platform at the network edge can offer several services by acting as a transformation engine between these field devices and various enterprise applications. We consider the EdgeX Foundry platform as such an IIoT middleware, discuss how EdgeX can provide ready-to-use integration of IoT devices, and show how we connect it with a low-code XMDD coordination layer that interfaces with EdgeX microservices through a Native DSL mechanism. We consider this technology landscape from the point of view of a building automation system example that supports high reconfigurability and security. We show how to produce all the essential elements of a complex Web based application to control the considered building systems. We demonstrate various features of the application's data and process models, how DSLs play a role at various levels, and how to add security capabilities that go beyond the cross-layer concerns and mechanisms offered by EdgeX. To this end, we introduce a declarative policy layer to be implemented using the open source ADD-Lib in form of an additional DSL for Attribute Based Encryption, with the aim of further enriching the capabilities around the EdgeX platform.

Internet of Things (IoT) applications combined with edge analytics are increasingly developed and deployed across a wide range of industries by engineers who are non-expert software developers. In order to enable them to build such IoT applications, we apply low-code technologies in this case study based on Model Driven Development. We use two different frameworks: DIME for the application design and implementation of IoT and edge aspects as well as analytics in R, and Pyrus for data analytics in Python, demonstrating how such engineers can build innovative IoT applications without having the full coding expertise. With this approach, we develop an application that connects a range of heterogeneous technologies: sensors through the EdgeX middleware platform with data analytics and web based configuration applications. The connection to data analytics pipelines can provide various kinds of information to the application users. Our innovative development approach has the potential to simplify the development and deployment of such applications in industry.

In many industries, traditional automation systems (operating technology) such as PLCs are being replaced with modern, networked ICT-based systems as part of a drive towards the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT). The intention behind this is to use more cost-effective, open platforms that also integrate better with an organisation’s information technology (IT) systems. In order to deal with heterogeneity in these systems, middleware platforms such as EdgeX Foundry, IoTivity, FI-WARE for Internet of Things (IoT) systems are under development that provide integration and try to overcome interoperability issues between devices of different standards. In this paper, we consider the EdgeX Foundry IIoT middleware platform as a transformation engine between field devices and enterprise applications. We also consider security as a critical element in this and discuss how to prevent or mitigate the possibility of several security risks. Here we address secure data access control by introducing a declarative policy layer implementable using Ciphertext-Policy Attribute-Based Encryption (CP-ABE). Finally, we tackle the interoperability challenge at the application layer by connecting EdgeX with DIME, a model-driven/low-code application development platform that provides methods and techniques for systematic integration based on layered Domain-Specific Languages (DSL). Here, EdgeX services are accessed through a Native DSL, and the application logic is designed in the DIME Language DSL, lifting middleware development/configuration to a DSL abstraction level. Through the use of DSLs, this approach covers the integration space domain by domain, technology by technology, and is thus highly generalizable and reusable. We validate our approach with an example IIoT use case in smart manufacturing.