Towards Consolidating Industrial Use Cases on a Common Fog Computing Platform

Abstract

Converging Information Technology (IT) and Operations Technology (OT) in modern factories remains a challenging task. Several approaches such as Cloud, Fog or Edge computing aim to provide possible solutions for bridging OT that requires strict real-time processing with IT that targets computing functionality. In this context, this paper contributes to ongoing Fog computing research by presenting three industrial use cases with a specific focus on consolidation of functionality. Each use case exemplifies scenarios on how to use the computational resources closer to the edge of the network provided by a Fog Computing Platform (FCP). All use-cases utilize the same proposed FCP, which allows drawing a set of requirements on future FCPs, e.g. hardware, virtualization, security, communication and resource management. The central element of the FCP is the Fog Node (FN), built upon commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) multicore processors (MCPs) and virtualization support. Resource management tools, advanced security features and state of the art communication protocols complete the FCP. The paper concludes by outlining future research challenges by comparing the proposed FCP with the identified requirements.

Tunnelling and Mirroring Operational Technology Data with IP-based Middlewares

“…It appears necessary to automate the configuration file generation if gateway instances are deployed dynamically, e.g., on fog or edge devices. This finding would confirm the challenges described in [27], [30]. Moreover, the variations of available middleware program language implementations (e.g., OPC UA is available in C, JAVA, or Python) increases the complexity for implementation, configuration and deployment of gateways.…”

“…Based on the specification, authors presented implementations and evaluations of prototypes with reduced functionality [26]. In a recent use case study to consolidate SCADA functionality onto a fog computing platform, the usage of such a prototype gateway revealed open issues regarding deployment, configuration, security and latency [27].…”

The FORA Fog Computing Platform for Industrial IoT

“…Use Cases UC2 and UC3 mentioned in Sect. 3 have been reported in [78,28], but without a focus on AADL modeling and evaluation.…”

“…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. Use Cases UC2 and UC3 mentioned in Section 3 have also been used to evaluate the proposed architecture, as reported in [13,14], but without a focus on AADL modeling.…”

“…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.…”