There are a multitude of electronic marketplaces that facilitate buyers and sellers in their transactions over the Internet. For Business-to-Business (B2B) transactions, related EDI standards are well established to handle system interoperability in the e-Commerce process. But in Business-to-Customer (B2C) transactions, from the end-user perspective, there is often a lock-in experience to the dedicated software application provided by the respective electronic marketplaces, without the possibility to use a single front-end application to handle business in different electronic shop systems. Standardized interfaces for this purpose are not sufficiently defined or established. In this work, the asset administration shell technology is evaluated in providing such a standardized interface, to achieve system interoperability of marketplaces towards end-customer applications.

The basis for electronic data exchange between manufacturers and system integrators of automation components such as sensor devices is the availability of standardized data models and an exchange data format for such automation components. These models need to cover the mechanical, electrical and sensing properties of the sensor device. This paper describes the results of the work of an industrial consortium within the AutomationML association providing a generic modeling methodology for automation components including electrical interfaces as well as proposals for modelling the detection properties of a sensor. It is also shown how the semantics of attributes are defined and how proprietary naming conventions can be easily integrated.

The Industrial Internet of Things requires standardization of communication technologies and protocols applied in that context. An emerging architectural concept is the so called "Edge" and its associated components and applications. The Edge Computing paradigm requires standardization of interfaces to enable cross-vendor interoperability between the different involved products and across the architectural layers. The current results in this direction of the "Labs Network Industrie 4.0" pre-standardization testbed will be presented in this paper and a brief overview given on further organizations working on the standardization of implementations in the edge context.

One of the key ideas of Industry 4.0 is the availability of a digital representation of each industrial asset within an Industry 4.0 network, the “Asset Administration Shell” (AAS). The AAS combines data related to an asset and software interfaces which provide access and explorability of the asset data in the network. Because an accepted standard is missing, component manufacturers are currently not able to economically release basic asset models for their products. This creates a deadlock situation for the widespread introduction of Industry 4.0 driven smart factory concepts. This paper describes and compares the most promising approaches to model the asset administration shell: the AAS model of the Platform I4.0, and the AutomationML component description of the AutomationML e.V. The technical concepts are comparatively analyzed for strengths and weaknesses and a useful combination of both model worlds is proposed.

In factory automation (FA) and process control, networks and protocols of the operation technology are more and more merged with those of the information technology (IT). The requirements of operational technology (OT) and IT are different. Modern networks and protocols for communication in FA and process control systems must take care of the coexistence and convergence between the IT and OT worlds. Due to historical developments, the standards for OT were and remain defined by the International Electrical Commission. The IT, on the other hand, is the domain of the International Telecommunication Union and the International Standard Organization (ISO), which takes over most of the standards in the communication field from the IEEE Standard groups 802. This paper provides an overview of the standardization bodies involved and provides examples on how different requirements introduced by OT and IT can coexist. The merging of OT and IT on an Ethernet network with time-sensitive networking is the key technology for real-time applications in the factory floor. The adoption of the industrial protocol OPC UA provides secure connections from the factory floor to automation cloud infrastructures. IO-Link wireless, as new standard for sensors and actuators in OT, provides coexistence mechanisms toward wireless standards in IT applications such as IEEE 802.11. These examples show that there are possibilities to coexist and even to merge the standards and technologies of OT and IT in a successful way.

To simplify the engineering of field devices, almost every fieldbus organization has developed its own Device Description Language (DDL), a formal language to describe the services and configuration options of field devices. The DDLs are usually tailored to the needs of the associated fieldbus engineering tool chain and unusable in tool chains of other vendors or in tools for other lifecycle phases. This paper describes a generic approach to overcome these shortcomings by means of AutomationML and provides an example for IO-Link masters and devices. The proposed method is generic and re-usable for other DDLs.

Factory automation applications operating on wireless communication systems may exceed the coverage area of a single base station, requiring the capability of device movement between multiple base stations. Roaming is a feature that allows such wireless device mobility between base station cells, but cyclic process data communication between PLC on the one side and the roaming wireless device on the other side gets usually interrupted during the handover process, not allowing real-time operation during this handover phase. It is shown that this is not an obstacle in factory automation applications when the handover process is kept under supervision of the PLC control program. This roaming concept is adopted with PNO's new “IO-Link wireless” standard.

The ability to remotely discover and configure devices in an automation network without the need for prior knowledge of the network topology or the identities of hosts and servers is a key requirement for industrial networks and cyber-physical systems. The Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) as a UDP-based standardized network protocol became very successful in computer networking and also to some extent in industrial networking, but it conceptually allows only device-initiated parameter assignment. This has led to the development of several other device configuration protocols that allow host-initiated device discovery and configuration. In this work, a survey on existing protocols is performed. Based on the results, a future solution is proposed as an extension of the OPC UA protocol suite. The proposal is able to meet the industrial needs for both device- and host-initiated operation with minimal invasive implementation.

In the context of the 4thindustrial revolution, the knowledge and management of the precise topological and geographical location of industrial equipment is a growing necessity. However, a holistic concept for topology and location management in process- and factory automation networks down to the field level is yet unknown. In this work, existing network and location management mechanisms are surveyed for suitability in industrial automation networks. Special attention is given to the inclusion of the non-TCP/IP protocol IO-Link to integrate sensors and actuators on the field level into a holistic network management concept. Since the proposed solution is based on established standards, it can be easy integrated into existing implementations.

Downtimes of failed devices in an industrial plant must be kept to a minimum to achieve high system availability. Since failures are often caused by transient hardware- or software faults, a well-defined System Self Diagnosis (SSD) functionality is an important feature for the effective long-term operation of industrial plants. To achieve effective SSD techniques for network infrastructure devices, a root cause analysis of past failures was conducted and a fault model derived. A set of error detection methods was derived based on the checked root cause indicators. For productive deployment, an extensible SSD framework in form of a rule based system was designed and implemented to be used as an embedded software tool throughout the whole product lifecycle of an industrial device, achieving a highly efficient “Design for Testability” approach.

Applying multiple redundant and diverse communication channels is an established method to achieve an improved overall communication channel. When applied for packet-based data transmission over channels with strongly nondeterministic behaviour due to environmental influence, such as Wireless Communications, timing performance can be greatly improved by this approach. The central element in such a system is the so called “Combiner” on the receiving side. In this work, a new specific type named “Timing Combiner” is described. The Parallel Redundancy Protocol (PRP) according to IEC 62439-3 realizes such a Timing Combiner on the Ethernet level. In this work, an OPNET simulation model is created and analysed for its performance characteristics. Also a quantitative analysis of the effect of different interference models in an industrial environment is presented.

The application of the “Parallel Redundancy Protocol” (PRP) according to IEC 62439-3 with two diverse redundant wireless channels achieves an improved overall wireless communication channel. Performance parameter like jitter and reliability increase significantly compared to the single wireless channels. In this work, a series of measurements on a redundant setup with two parallel WLANs according to IEEE 802.11n in diverse configuration settings is conducted and the results presented. A Markov model for the parallel redundant system is developed and the analytical results compared against the measurements.

In the case of failing equipment in industrial plants, the replacement time and effort must be kept at a minimum to increase the overall system availability. A well-designed Faulty Device Replacement (FDR) concept is therefore a central issue to the effective operation of industrial plants. Network enabled devices supporting FDR with minimum subsequent manual device configuration after replacement form a key requirement to improve repairability. To achieve this, several FDR techniques have been proposed and implemented by different vendors and organizations. In this work, a performance model for the time to repair and a taxonomy for existing FDR methods is provided. This can be used as a basis for comparative performance measurements to derive the most suitable method during the planning phase of an industrial network.

PROFINET IO is designed with a modular structure of the IO devices. Certified modular PROFINET IO devices are usually shipped with a General Station Description (GSD) file that does not contain the actual module configuration of the IO device. With common appliances the modules must subsequently be configured manually in the engineering tool. This can become an elaborate task in large PROFINET IO installations and it would therefore be useful to have some tool support to automatically detect and import the actually installed modules in an IO device. As a solution we propose a GSD file generator that creates the GSD file with the actual module configuration by retrieving the real data from the device via SNMP. This paper presents the implemented mechanism and gives some attention to certification issues.

Ethernet ring redundancy is becoming a commodity in Industrial Ethernet environments. There are many ring redundancy protocols in existence, both standardized and proprietary. They all share the common disadvantage, that they can sustain only one fault in the network structure. A second fault results in parts of the network being unavailable. In this paper, we propose a mechanism which enhances well-known ring redundancy protocols with the capability of tolerating more than a single fault. This is achieved by installing secondary network paths and adding health monitoring to the ring clients. Protocol operation has been tested through simulation and prototypical implementation and is intended to be part of a future major software release of Hirschmann switches. A main advantage of this new protocol is the straightforward network design approach that enables to specifically protect vulnerable ring segments, based on availability calculations.

In modern communication systems based on Ethernet technology, the use of physical ring structures and ring redundancy protocols has been common for some time in the past. A challenge remains the configuration of such a redundancy protocol on each device with the networks stretching out over large areas, like in offshore wind power stations, where each windmill houses at least one Ethernet switch. The distance between windmills can be several kilometers and configuration of the redundancy protocol on each device is an elaborate process. In this paper, a mechanism is proposed which automatizes the configuration of ring redundancy protocols and eliminates the need to configure each device separately. The actual protocol implementation is intended to be part of the next major software release of Hirschmann Industrial Ethernet Switches.