At the SPS IPC Drives in Germany a joint working group between the leading automation manufacturers announced to work together on a set of vendor independent standards for the next generation of industrial communication products. This set of standards is based on OPC UA and Time Sensitive Networking (TSN) and shall be used throughout the automation pyramid. This work contributes to analyze the performance of OPC UA and TSN. Therefore, a test framework is implemented to measure the round trip time of a peer-to-peer communication. The round trip time is an important performance indicator for controller-to-controller and controller-to-field device use cases.

Within the context of Industry 4.0, future production systems are expected to support mass customization up to lot size one. In order to realize the individual production processes, a changeable and consistent integration of assets from different manufacturers is required. Therefore, the concept of I4.0 components was developed. Every I4.0 component provides a so-called asset administration shell, i.e. a standardized virtual representation of its capabilities. This paper focuses on real-time I4.0 components that require a deterministic communication with bounded low-latency in-between. In contrast to non-real-time I4.0 components, Ethernet (IEEE 802.3) is enhanced by the new real-time communication technology Time-Sensitive Networking (TSN, IEEE 802.1). The basic configuration of TSN connections within the asset administration shell was already addressed by previous work. In this work, we present the configuration of application layer protocols using the example of OPC UA Publish/Subscribe (PubSub). More precisely, we outline the underlying concept and define additional submodels for the asset administration shell of real-time I4.0 components. Finally, we discuss the advantages of the presented approach in terms of changeability.

In today's factory automation the exchange of data between systems becomes more and more important. The goal is to use one communication technology through all levels of a factory automation. Now the challenge is to find a communication technology that fulfills all the requirements on the different levels. The Server/Client architecture used in OPC UA became the de facto standard for several use cases in the upper levels, but in the lower levels e.g. Control-to-Control and Field level, OPC UA wasn't performant enough to replace today's fieldbus technologies. Therefore the OPC Foundation extended OPC UA by a Publish Subscribe architecture which was released in March 2018 in the OPC UA Specification Part 14. This paper gives an overview of this specification and an evaluation of the applicability of OPC UA communication technologies in combination with Time-Sensitive Networking (TSN) on factory automation use cases.

When implementing new information systems, organizations often face resistance behavior from employees who avoid or underutilize the system. We analyze the extent to which such user resistance behavior is explained by users’ perceptions of the technology compared with their perceptions of work routines. We developed a research model based on work system theory and evaluated it using a study (N=106) of a human resources information system implementation in one organization. The results show that work routines are an object of resistance during IS implementations. We identify perceived usefulness and perceived ease of executing work routines as perceptions of work routines during an IS implementation that have a strong influence on user resistance behavior. In addition, our results show that the perceived ease of executing the work routines mediates the impact of perceived ease of use on user resistance behavior. In practice, our findings imply that interventions during IT implementations should focus on both the new technology and changing work routines.

As the number of messages and social relationships embedded in social networking sites (SNS) increases, the amount of social information demanding a reaction from individuals increases as well. We observe that, as a consequence, SNS users feel they are giving too much social support to other SNS users. Drawing on social support theory (SST), we call this negative association with SNS usage ‘social overload’ and develop a latent variable to measure it. We then identify the theoretical antecedents and consequences of social overload and evaluate the social overload model empirically using interviews with 12 and a survey of 571 Facebook users. The results show that extent of usage, number of friends, subjective social support norms, and type of relationship (online-only vs offline friends) are factors that directly contribute to social overload while age has only an indirect effect. The psychological and behavioral consequences of social overload include feelings of SNS exhaustion by users, low levels of user satisfaction, and a high intention to reduce or even stop using SNS. The resulting theoretical implications for SST and SNS acceptance research are discussed and practical implications for organizations, SNS providers, and SNS users are drawn.

Due to the shortage of skilled workforce and the increasing usage of social network sites, companies increasingly apply social network sites to attract potential applicants. This paper explores how corporate career presences on network sites should be realized in order to attract potential applicants. Therefore, we tested the impact of seven individual characteristics (namely Appointments, Daily Working Routine, Jobs, Corporate News, Entertainment, Media Format, and Features) of these corporate career presences that we extracted by a comprehensive pre-study on users' perceived hedonic and utilitarian value of these presences on social network sites. Based on an online survey with 470 participants, the results reveal a highly significant impact of five characteristics that corporate career presences provide both a hedonic as well as a utilitarian value to the user.