In the Industry 4.0 era, with the continuous integration of industrial field systems and upper-layer facilities, interconnection between industrial wireless sensor networks (IWSNs) and industrial Internet networks is becoming increasingly pivotal. However, when deployed in real industrial scenarios, IWSNs are often connected to legacy control systems, through some wired industrial network protocols via gateways. Complex protocol translation is required in these gateways, and semantic interoperability is lacking between IWSNs and the industrial Internet. To fill this gap, our study focuses on realizing the interconnection and interoperability between an IWSN and the industrial Internet. The Open Platform Communications Unified Architecture (OPC UA) and joint publish/subscribe (pub/sub) communication between the two networks are used to achieve efficient transmission. Taking the Wireless Networks for Industrial Automation Process Automation (WIA-PA), a typical technology in IWSNs, as an example, we develop a communication architecture that adopts OPC UA as a communication bridge to integrate the WIA-PA network into the industrial Internet. A WIA-PA virtualization method for OPC UA pub/sub data sources is designed to solve the data mapping problem between WIA-PA and OPC UA. Then, the WIA-PA/OPC UA joint pub/sub transmission mechanism and the corresponding configuration mechanism are designed. Finally, a laboratory-level verification system is implemented to validate the proposed architecture, and the experimental results demonstrate its promising feasibility and capability.

Age of information (AoI) is an emerging network metric that measures information freshness from an application layer perspective. It can evaluate the timeliness of information in industrial wireless sensor networks (IWSNs). Previous research has primarily focused on minimizing the long-term average AoI of the entire system. However, in practical industrial applications, optimizing the average AoI does not guarantee that the peak AoI of each data packet is within a bounded interval. If the AoI of certain packets exceeds the predetermined threshold, it can have a significant impact on the stability of the industrial control system. Therefore, this paper studies the scheduling problem subject to a hard AoI performance requirement in IWSNs. First, we propose a low-complexity AoI-bounded scheduling algorithm for IWSNs that guarantees that the AoI of each packet is within a bounded interval. Then, we analyze the schedulability conditions of the algorithm and propose a method to decrease the peak AoI of nodes with higher AoI requirements. Finally, we present a numerical example that illustrates the proposed algorithm step by step. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of our algorithm, which can guarantee bounded AoI intervals (BAIs) for all nodes.

Agile Product Line Engineering (APLE), a relatively new approach combining the two successful methods of Agile Software Development (ASD) and Software Product Lines (SPLs), makes product lines more responsive to ever-changing customer needs or market changes. However, SPLs often fail to keep up with market demand due to high coordination costs, slow development processes, and long release cycles in the case of frequent changes in business requirements; in agile software projects, the lack of a unified specification for describing requirements leads to high coordination costs and inconvenient requirement management. Some studies in the literature have proposed optimized approaches to integrate ASD and SPLs, but they still have not covered all aspects of APLE’s characteristics, and software resource reuse is rarely considered in these approaches during product line development. In view of this, we propose a collaborative framework of agile product line engineering for software resource reuse, namely ScrumOntoSPL. The ScrumOntoSPL approach efficiently merges ASD and SPL based on the agile method Scrum, SPL architecture, and ontology technology. In ScrumOntoSPL, uniform requirement specification is constructed by utilizing ontology, and the Matching Requirement with Component (MRC) process is designed to match product new requirements and software resources stored in a resource pool. In addition, we evaluated the proposed framework and approach with CMMI. In the end, a case study of a software development tool called IMC-Tool based on ScrumOntoSPL for a universal Instrument Microcontroller Chip (IMC) is discussed. The IMC-Tool case illustrates that the ScrumOntoSPL has the advantages of dynamically managing demand changes, enhancing software resource reuse, reducing coordination costs, and reducing time to market.