Industry 4.0 (I40) Connectivity: Smart Factory Communications

Zusammenfassung

The term smart factory focuses on a vision of how industrial production will look like in the future. Machinery and equipment will be able to self-organize and make decisions autonomously. Part of the smart factory vision is that relevant data will be available in real-time, leading to faster decisions; this will result in the design of more flexible, effective, innovative, hybrid, and efficient processes. Multiple redundancy protocols will contribute to high reliability in smart factory communication. The success of the smart factory vision depends on the underlying communication technologies achieving high-performance levels; in case the communication infrastructure cannot meet the requirements, many applications will not work as intended. In this article, the basics of the Internet of Things (IoT), the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), Industry 4.0 (I40), and Smart Factory are introduced, followed by an analysis of smart factory communications. This study focuses on how the manufacturing landscape is changing for smart factories. It is analyzed how communications in manufacturing Local Area Networks should be structured, what kind of challenges for security and reliability companies have to consider for implementing the smart factory concept, how they should organize the network management, and what kind of network topology organizations should use for different communication structures. The paper concluded with a network management scenario for the smart factory of the future.