The Internet of Things (IoT) represents the binder of two worlds, specifically the real one and the digital one: tangible objects become recognizable in the virtual world, having digital matches, thus creating a network that enables the connection in-between the components. With the contemporary evolution of this domain, interconnectivity has become a primary fraction of new research and development directions. The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) is a concept that covers the more industrial level of the physical and digital connection and stays behind the Industry 4.0 concept. Supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) applications are important in the industry, their core being very present as complex products of big companies, at high prices. The Node-RED environment quickly evolved as one of the most important perspectives in IIoT, able to replace, up to a certain level, classic SCADA applications, bringing benefits to the industry. In this paper, the main focus is to evidence this aspect and to develop an application that will demonstrate the functionality of the concept, making use of protocols such as Modbus TCP (Transmission Control Protocol) for interacting with industrial devices and Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT) to interact with higher-levels, which provides a publish-subscribe structuring and a low band-width usage. The application uses logging and archiving modules based on InfluxDB database and is conceived to achieve the visual supervisory structure as close as possible to well-known SCADA solutions. The presented work results prove the efficiency of the solution.

Image compression is a vital component for domains in which the computational resources are usually scarce such as automotive or telemedicine fields. Also, when discussing real-time systems, the large amount of data that must flow through the system can represent a bottleneck. Therefore, the storage of images, alongside the compression, transmission, and decompression procedures, becomes vital. In recent years, many compression techniques that only preserve the quality of the region of interest of an image have been developed, the other parts being either discarded or compressed with major quality loss. This paper proposes a study of relevant papers from the last decade which are focused on the selection of a region of interest of an image and on the compression techniques that can be applied to that area. To better highlight the novelty of the hybrid methods, classical state-of-the-art approaches are also analyzed. The current work will provide an overview of classical and hybrid compression methods alongside a categorization based on compression ratio and other quality factors such as mean-square error and peak signal-to-noise ratio, structural similarity index measure, and so on. This overview can help researchers to develop a better idea of what compression algorithms are used in certain domains and to find out if the presented performance parameters are of interest for the intended purpose.

Considering Industry 4.0 directions, followed by recent Industry 5.0 principles, interest in integrating legacy systems in industrial manufacturing has emerged. Due to the continuous evolution of the Internet of Things (IoT) and the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), as well as the rapid extension of the scope and adoption of broader technologies, such integration has become feasible. Even though newly developed equipment provides easier interoperability, the replacement of legacy systems highly impacts cost and sustainability, which usually extends to the entire production process, the operators and the maintenance team, and sometimes even the robustness of the production process. Ensuring the interoperability of legacy systems is a problematic task, being dependent on technologies and development techniques and specific industrial domain particularities. This paper considers strategies to ensure the interoperability of legacy systems in a building-management system scenario where local structures are approached using both industrial protocols and web-based contexts. The solution is built following the Industry 5.0 pillars (sustainability, human focus, resilience) and conceives the entire data acquisition and supervisory solution to be flexible, open-source, resilient, and under the control of company engineers. The chosen environment for interfacing and supervision is Node-RED, enabling IoT and IIoT tools, together with a complete orientation toward digital transformation. This way, it is possible to construct a final result that enhances security while bridging outdated protocols and technologies, eliminating compatibility risks in the context of the evolutionary IIoT, ensuring critical process functions are possible, and aiding operators in complying with regulations governing building-management system (BMS) operations, thus solving the challenges that arise in the complex task of adopting the IoT backbone of digital transformation in relation to the integration of legacy equipment. The obtained solution is tested in an automotive industry building-management system, and the results demonstrate its performance, reliability, and high customizability in a context of openness and low cost.

Securing critical infrastructures and manufacturing plants in the Industrial-Internet-Of-Things and Industry 4.0 is a challenge today due to the increased number of attacks against automation and SCADA systems. These systems were built without any security considerations in mind, so the evolution towards interconnection and interoperability makes them vulnerable in the context of exposing data to the outside network. Even though new protocols are considering built-in security, the widely spread legacy standard protocols need to be protected. Hence, this paper attempts to offer a solution for securing the legacy insecure communication protocols based on elliptic curve cryptography while fulfilling the time constraints of a real SCADA network. Elliptic curve cryptography is chosen to respond to the low memory resources available for the low level devices of a SCADA network (e.g., PLCs), and also because it can achieve the same level of security as other cryptographic algorithms using smaller sizes for the secure keys. Furthermore, the proposed security methods have the purpose of assuring that the data transmitted between entities of a SCADA and automation system are authentic and confidential. The experimental results showed good timing performance for the cryptographic operations executed on Industruino and MDUINO PLCs, demonstrating that our proposed concept is deployable for Modbus TCP communication in a real automation/SCADA network on existing devices from the industry.

The architectural approach for complex communication systems must adapt quickly and take into consideration the increasing set of requirements for every industrial field. The automotive domain is evolving toward the electrification era, with massive technological transformations being realized on all architectural, hardware, and software levels. The legacy usage of exclusively microcontrollers is altered by adopting microprocessors with extended functionalities, reshaping the development structure. Although new hardware capabilities are available and Ethernet communication protocols can contribute to a new range of use-cases for intra-car or for vehicle-to-X (V2X) communication, the implications of using multiple protocols that cover different types of requirements, in the same architecture, are not fully determined. The importance of establishing clear expectations for intelligent communication systems considering various technological and architectural factors is significant for future improvements. In the current paper, we examine the compatibility and real-time responsiveness capabilities, in a diverse, service-oriented architecture, for the major automotive IoT Ethernet-based communication technologies. The feasibility analysis is materialized in a multi-protocol gateway solution that facilitates data exchange between entities with different technological origins. Scalable Service-Oriented Middleware over IP (SOME/IP) is considered the relevant protocol in the automotive domain, alongside the Data Distribution Service (DDS), which combines automotive and IoT applicability. The enhanced Communication Abstraction Layer (eCAL) middleware is added to the mix as an alternative solution for future communication scenarios. The obtained results confirm the compatibility between the targeted technologies, offering a clear understanding regarding the limits of a complex multi-protocol communication system. The defined service-oriented architecture offers efficient data exchanges in a gateway context, also allowing the exploration of the real-time capabilities.

Continuing the evolution towards Industry 4.0, the industrial communication protocols represent a significant topic of interest, as real-time data exchange between multiple devices constitute the pillar of Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) scenarios. Although the legacy protocols are still persistent in the industry, the transition was initiated by the key Industry 4.0 facilitating protocol, the Open Platform Communication Unified Architecture (OPC UA). OPC UA has to reach the envisioned applicability, and it therefore has to consider coexistence with other emerging real-time oriented protocols in the production lines. The Data Distribution Service (DDS) will certainly be present in future architectures in some areas as robots, co-bots, and compact units. The current paper proposes a solution to evaluate the real-time coexistence of OPC UA and DDS protocols, functioning in parallel and in a gateway context. The purpose is to confirm the compatibility and feasibility between the two protocols alongside a general definition of criteria and expectations from an architectural point of view, pointing out advantages and disadvantages in a neutral manner, shaping a comprehensive view of the possibilities. The researched architecture is meant to comply with both performance comparison scenarios and interaction scenarios over a gateway application. Considering the industrial tendencies, the developed solution is applied using non-ideal infrastructures to provide a more feasible and faster applicability in the production lines.