Fogification of electric drives: An industrial use case

Abstract

Electric drives are used to control electric motors, which are pervasive in industrial applications. In this paper we propose enhancing the electric drives to fulfil the role of fog nodes within a Fog Computing Platform (FCP). Fog Computing is envisioned as a realization of future distributed architectures in Industry 4.0. We identify the system-level requirements of such an FCP, including requirements that are extracted from the current architecture of drives, which we consider as a baseline. These requirements are then used to design a system-level architecture, which we model using the Architecture Analysis & Design Language (AADL). We identify the "technology bricks" (components such as hardware, software, middleware, services, methods and tools) needed to implement the FCP. The proposed fog-based architecture is then used to implement a Conveyor Belt industrial use case. We evaluate the resulting use case on several aspects, demonstrating the usefulness of the proposed fog-based approach. By developing the electric drives as fog nodes, that we call fogification, new offerings like programmability, analytics and connectivity to customer Clouds are expected to increase the added value. Increased flexibility allows drives to assume a larger role in industrial and domestic control systems, instrumenting thus also legacy systems by using drives as the data source.

The FORA Fog Computing Platform for Industrial IoT

“…3). The details of UC1 have been presented in [8]. Here, we extend that work to: show how the AADL from Sect.…”

“…In this section we report the results obtained when modeling, implementing and evaluating a Conveyor Distribution System Use Case (UC1 mentioned in Section 3). The details of UC1 have been presented in [12]. Here, we extend that work to: show how the AADL from Section 4 can be used to model the UC; show how the FORA Technology Bricks can be plugged into this AADL model to implement a prototype; evaluate the ability of successfully implementing the UC using the proposed reference architecture.…”

“…We use the standardized Architecture Analysis Design Language (AADL) [11] (which is an SAE standard) to model the FCP architecture. We have used several industrial Use Cases (UCs) [12][13][14] to evaluate the proposed architecture. We report in the paper in detail the results obtained by using the architecture to implement an industrial conveyor distribution system UC.…”

Electric drives as fog nodes in a fog computing‐based industrial use case

“…However, the use case was relatively small, and the evaluation limited. The main novelty of the work in [40] is the use a semi-formal notation for the proposed design, that is, the architecture analysis & design language (AADL), which is an architecture description language from the domain of real-time embedded systems [41]. AADL has been standardized by the Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) and employs a component-oriented approach for modeling systems using both textual syntax and graphical notation with precise semantics [41].…”

Towards Extensibility-Aware Scheduling of Industrial Applications on Fog Nodes

“…As a result, the execution of these tasks may affect the timing requirements of the existing native tasks and hence compromise their performance and safety, e.g., if the native tasks are part of safety-critical applications. This work's motivation stems from the need for industrial equipment implemented as FNs to run mixed-criticality native tasks alongside the temporary tasks for the industrial domain similar to [25]. We aim to bring extensibility to FNs' schedules in order to accommodate temporary tasks into the static schedules of native tasks, and thus efficiently use the available resources of FNs.…”