This paper proposes a project to teach in a practical way several key factors of the Industry 4.0 technologies for electrical engineering students and teachers. The key factors are cibersecurity in industrial networks, industrial SCADA protocols and remote maintenance. Remote access to industrial networks is one of the contributions that Industry 4.0 has popularized because it makes industrial networks reachable using the public Internet. Remote maintenance is one of the great beneficiaries of this functionality. However, this access increases the security risks because a new and important vulnerability is opened by the access possibility from any computer connected to the Internet. To address this challenge, engineering students have to deal with industrial protocols topics, cibersecurity topics and control topics. This work presents an educational project to actively implement an atractive solution for remote access in industrial networks using open-source solutions. The selected open source solutions are the industrial telemetry protocol MQTT in the exchange of access control commands between the involved devices, the openvpn and ssh as a well-known VPN open-source product used for the remote access itself, the NodeRED platform as control dashboard and the IEC62443 industrial cybersecurity standard in order to monitor and audit the effectiveness of the project.

The paper presents the planned activities of the Erasmus+ Capacity Building in Higher Education for development and delivery of innovative curricula in maintenance engineering. The SM-TMC (Southern Mediterranean Maintenance Centre of Excellence) project, led by the University of Sfax, establishes, among others, a framework for Higher Education in Maintenance Engineering to equip students with competences in Industry, Informatics and Communications to lead generic maintenance skills and, in particular, Maintenance 4.0. The project started with a needs analysis survey involving higher education institutions and many industry stakeholders in Tunisia to analyse the status of educational programmes on maintenance engineering education. Issues relating to curriculum development were identified, such as the increasing needs in training teachers with a high degree of specialised knowledge and skills to carry out a creative and interdisciplinary maintenance engineering curriculum. In addition, universities do not maintain close links with industry to boost the practical competence of their graduates. To address the problems and challenges identified, universities and companies from Tunisia, France, Portugal, Romania, and Spain are sharing human and technological resources and infrastructures to design new curricula, based on the European Credit Transfer System, to be used in the partners’ educational programmes in maintenance engineering. The project is in the pilot testing phase of the innovative curricula.

This paper introduces a simple production and maintenance topology based on the Industry 4.0 principles. The paper defines the parts of the topology, hardware, software and communication protocols, and suggest the use of several low cost devices and open source software solutions. The whole solution is featured as a testbed for educational purposes, and presents the most important parts of the Maintenance 4.0 paradigm based on the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT). An use case is presented by using several ESP8266 devices as sensors, a data gateway implemented in a Raspberry Pi computer and the MQTT communication protocol to communicate with the edge and cloud servers.

One of the levels of the SM-TMC (South Mediterranean Tunisian Maintenance Centre of Excellence) project, led by the University of Sfax, is to establish a frame for Higher Education in Maintenance Engineering in order to give the students skills in Industrial Engineering, Informatics and Communications Engineering to lead in generic maintenance skills and particularly in Maintenance 4.0. Therefore, this work presents the core lines for a “PBL strategy for learning Maintenance and Manufacturing Engineering.” The main objective of the present study is to show new trending in the teaching-learning process of manufacturing and maintenance by using the method of analysis of the problem, solution design, development, and manufacture of product/system, and analyze all the problems and factors of influence maintenance. The main factors that influence in the learning process such as project evaluation criteria, creativity, design difficulties, manufacturing difficulties, and the approach from design to the manufactured product taking account the maintenance methodology have been measured qualitatively.

Send-on-Delta (SoD) transmission strategies takes decision to send a data-packet based on a relationship between the data, a reference data and a threshold called delta-value. This work presents a solution to determine dynamically the delta-value for the linear predicted Send-on-Delta strategy given a desired average throughput. The proposed solution is based on the determination of a relationship between the delta-value and the throughput, and modeling in real-time the transmission rate. The goal is to reduce the tracking error relative to the traditional periodic transmission methods. Simulation results show the feasibility of the method tested for continuous uniform signals and a robot trajectory in a cyber-physical space.

The new features that are being added today in cars for assisted or autonomous driving tasks require a specific study that allows these tasks to be performed efficiently. Among these tasks, in this work the application of advanced control methods for the lane change maneuver is studied, obtaining better results than the classic methods which are inherently limited to fundamental limitations of the linear systems. An application of the reset method based on the linear confinement of trajectories is presented, which allows to reduce the error to zero quickly. This method is compared by simulation with another reset control method, the reset control with optimal reset. And then, the method is validate in CarSim.

This work presents a V2V video transmission system to help on a car-overtaking decision using the IEEE 802.11p/WAVE communication technology. The system consists on a ffmpeg based video encoder that encapsulates the data received from a camera placed in a front vehicle into HTTP Post packets, and forwards the packet to the rear vehicle through the On Board Units (OBUs) installed on both vehicles. The rear vehicle presents the images to the driver using a visualization device. The proposed system was evaluated through real vehicular experiments in two distinct scenarios: urban and highway. Performance studies were focused on delay measurements, re- transmission rate, signal strength and bandwidth consumption related with the traveling speeds and video quality. Results show that the communication delay is higher in the highway scenario, mainly due to the distance between vehicles and the different speeds. However, promising results regarding the maximum delay and the average number of retransmissions foresee important inputs for future services of assisted-driving, in general, and car- overtaking assistance, in particular.

This paper proposes an algorithm to select dynamically an appropriate threshold for basic amplitude sampling transmission strategies (also called Send-on-Delta SoD strategies) given an available transmission rate. It is based on previously found relationships between threshold and throughput, and on justified approximations. The algorithm is presented to be computed in a Send-on-Delta (SoD) driver and is tested for a simple networked control system through simulations. It is compared with a conforming periodic transmission strategy and a constant threshold send-on-delta transmission strategy. Results show the feasibility of the proposed solution.

Internet of Things (IoT) devices in industrial environments can be a significant increase in the network load of the local IP backbone, involving the network performance. To deal with the important amount of network traffic generated by the IoT devices, this paper proposes the use of IoT gateways in industrial environments (but not limited to) that unifies the data structures improving the size efficiency, and filters the data to be send across the shared IP backbone. To implement this solution some data structures and a multidimensional deadband scheme are presented. Simulations are performed using Networked Control Systems as IoT devices to show the feasibility of the proposed solution.

To well design remotely controlled industrial plants through the Internet, it is mandatory to know and use the Internet features and parameters. This paper describes how to sense Internet delays and packet losses in real time to reliably reproduce the global system in a laboratory environment. In this work we present a system that performs as a sensor of Internet delays and packet losses and as an actuator that reproduces these parameters into a local data flow. The paper shows how to solve some usual problems like the spontaneous high delay problem, and it presents some comparative results with other network emulator.

Teleoperation over shared networks like Internet can take advantage of the deadband approach to reduce data traffic. In this work a passivity-based framework to teleoperate a three-dimensional force-feedback system with deadband control is designed and implemented. The teleoperated slave is a gantry crane and the teleoperation master is a haptic device controlled by a human operator. A deadband reconstruction algorithm based on energy supervision is presented, which preserves passivity of the deadband controlled communication for arbitrary time delays. Experiments to determine the framework parameters are made, and they shows that the passivity of the whole system is preserved, even with variable delays.

This paper investigates the possibility of deriving frequency-domain conditions for robust stability in presence of time-varying communication delays and parametric uncertainties in the four-channel control scheme. This teleoperation setup can be modeled as a negative single feedback loop containing a linear time invariant LTI block and an uncertain time-varying delay for applying the analysis tool based on mu-plots. With this model we can also justify the proposed γ-4C scheme, which introduces a tuning factor γ to increase in practical conditions the stable region fixing the desired bounds on time-varying delay, with the particularity of maintaining the tracking properties provided by the 4C transparent control scheme. Simulation results justify the proposed controllers and confirm the stability robustness.