Approach to Adapt a Legacy Manufacturing System Into the IoT Paradigm

Abstract

Abstract-Enterprises are adopting the Internet of Things paradigm as a strategy to improve competitiveness. But enterprises also need to rely on their legacy systems, which are of vital importance to them and normally difficult to reconfigure or modify, their mere replacement being usually not affordable. These systems constitute, therefore, barriers to agility and competitiveness, raising the need to develop cost-effective ways for IoT adaptation. An approach for adapting legacy manufacturing systems into the IoT realm is proposed in this research. The methodology is twofold: an adaptation board is firstly designed to provide IoT connectivity, allowing to remotely invoke the "legacy" functionality as services. Then, the board itself can leverage the legacy system by developing additional functionalities inside it, as the update process is usually triggered by the need of new functionality from these systems. An experiment, which consists of adapting to IoT a small distribution line that is controlled by an aged Programmable Logic Controller, is developed to illustrate how straightforward, affordable and cost effective the adaptation approach is, allowing to holistically achieve a new system with more sophisticated functionality.

Inter-Technology Bridging Gateway: A Low Cost Legacy Adaptation Approach to Secure Industrial Systems

“…In contrast to previous works [10], [11], ITBG equips legacy devices and applications with modern and secure technologies. It is a significant refinement over [14] by enabling twoway protocols/standards translation and supporting security features.…”

“…Authors in [10], [11] addressed legacy adaptation by providing connectivity. Thus, legacy devices can be remotely accessed and controlled.…”

“…This paper presents a plug & play Inter-Technology Bridging Gateway (ITBG) to address legacy adaptation and security issues in industry modernization. Unlike previous works [10], [11], the scope of the proposed ITBG is not to provide remote controllability to legacy devices. Instead, ITBG eliminates technological gap between legacy and new systems which were manufactured using different communication standards.…”

Data Acquisition and Monitoring System for Legacy Injection Machines

“…Although the treatment of the different files is done differently, the reasoning and the final implementation is always the same. Basically, the written file in the shared folder by the data collection system is opened, the last written cycle is read and saved in an open source time series database (Influx DB 1 ).…”

“…Regarding this, it is necessary to find the best tradeoff between innovation and the possible investment turnover, as not all companies are equipped with recent equipment with standardized communication protocols for data collection and transmission like the OPC-UA, and are unable to replace the entire shop floors with new equipment. Therefore, it is necessary to adapt the existing equipment on the factory floor [1] [2] so that it is possible to have the process data in real time to be further processed to draw conclusions that can improve performance [3], production [4], maintenance schedules, among others.…”