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.
As Industry 4.0 networks continue to evolve at a rapid pace, they are becoming increasingly complex and distributed. These networks incorporate a range of technologies that are integrated into smart manufacturing systems, requiring adaptability, security, and resilience. However, managing the complexity of Industry 4.0 networks presents significant challenges, particularly in terms of security and the integration of diverse technologies into a functioning and efficient infrastructure. To address these challenges, emerging digital twin standards are enabling the connection of various systems by linking individual digital twins, creating a system of systems. The objective is to develop a “universal translator” that can interpret inputs from both the real and digital worlds, merging them into a seamless cyber-physical reality. It will be demonstrated how the myriad of technologies and systems in Industry 4.0 networks can be connected through the use of digital twins to create a seamless “system of systems”. This will improve interoperability, resilience, and security in smart manufacturing systems. The paper will also outline the potential benefits and limitations of digital twins in addressing the challenges of Industry 4.0 networks.
The introduction of new wireless technologies is one of the requirements for the digital transformation of manufacturing technology. The implementation of wireless devices, such as smart sensors and flexible programmable robots, requires an increase in the data transfer rate, the number of wireless network nodes and, as a result, an increase in the density of the wireless data transmission channels. Often, devices use different data transfer protocols and different radio frequencies simultaneously, which may, in turn, lead to both overlap and interference of signals.The study will be conducted within a smart manufacturing factory cell, where network throughput, latency, and RSSI will be among the data points collected. The goal is to evaluate the effects of typical production floor activities on signal strength, throughput, and latency, such as when a robot obstructs the wireless signal. The collected RSSI values will be presented on a heatmap generated in MATLAB. The data will be gathered using equipment that is both cost-effective and readily available, making it feasible for smaller operations to perform plant analysis.
High performance networking is at the core of every industrial system, as more and more companies look inwards towards the digital transformation of their entire manufacturing environment. The driving factor for all these changes is Industry 4.0, there are many options for communication systems for the latest generations of hardware with one of the most promising technologies being private 5G networks. A smart automation use case will be implemented using private 5G as the communication backbone, the performance of this communication type will be compared to other communication types that were historically used within smart automation and manufacturing settings. Performance metrics will be compared to show typical performance that may be expected when deploying a private 5G communication network. The paper will also explore the roadmap for future 5G performance increases through updates and network optimization.
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