The concept of digital twin (DT) has emerged to enable the benefits of future paradigms such as the industrial Internet of Things and Industry 4.0. The idea is to bring every data source and control interface description related to a product or process available through a single interface, for auto-discovery and automated communication establishment. However, designing the architecture of a DT to serve every future application is an ambitious task. Therefore, the prototyping systems for specific applications are required to design the DT incrementally. We developed a novel DT prototype to analyze the requirements of communication in a mission-critical application such as mobile networks supported remote surgery. Such operations require low latency and high levels of security and reliability and therefore are a perfect subject for analyzing DT communication and cybersecurity. The system comprised of a robotic arm and HTC vive virtual reality (VR) system connected over a 4G mobile network. More than 70 test users were employed to assess the system. To address the cybersecurity of the system, we incorporated a network manipulation module to test the effect of network outages and attacks; we studied state of the art practices and their utilization within DTs. The capability of the system for actual remote surgery is limited by capabilities of the VR system and insufficient feedback from the robot. However, simulations and research of remote surgeries could be conducted with the system. As a result, we propose ideas for communication establishment and necessary cybersecurity technologies that will help in developing the DT architecture. Furthermore, we concluded that developing the DT requires cross-disciplinary development in several different engineering fields. Each field makes use of its own tools and methods, which do not always fit together perfectly. This is a potentially major obstacle in the realization of Industry 4.0 and similar concepts.INDEX TERMS Digital twin, virtual reality, robot control, mobile networks, network security.
Industrial Cyber-Physical Systems consist of multiple machines working together and demand efficient and flexible communication methods to function as intended. The protocols used in industrial operations and web applications are often contradictory in regards to the latency and security characteristics. Due to these differences, the intersection of operation and information technologies is a challenging area. But the rewards in smoother information flow are also high, providing a fruitful area for development. This paper introduces a general wrapper application to enable the use of the industrial OPC UA server through an interface implemented with web technology GraphQL. The results demonstrate sufficient performance for the middleware to be used in an overhead crane control application, bringing the agility of web development to industrial environments.
Industry 4.0 and Cyber-physical systems require easy access to shop-floor data, which allows the monitoring and optimization of the manufacturing process. To achieve this, several papers have proposed various ways to make OPC UA (Open Platform Communications Unified Architecture), a standard protocol for industrial communication, RESTful (Representational State Transfer). As an alternative to REST, GraphQL has recently gained popularity amongst web developers. This paper compares the characteristics of the REST and GraphQL interfaces for OPC UA and conducts measurements on reading and writing data. The measurements show that GraphQL offers better performance than REST when multiple values are read or written, whereas REST is faster with single values. However, using OPC UA directly outperforms both REST and GraphQL interfaces. As a conclusion, this paper recommends using a GraphQL interface alongside an OPC UA server in smart factories to simultaneously yield easy data access, the best performance, and maximum interoperability.
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