Feasibility of connecting machinery and robots to industrial control services in the cloud

Abstract

The potential of cloud manufacturing, i.e. using cloud- and service-oriented IT structures in industrial applications, goes far beyond the current state of technology. The modularization and dissolution of the “automation pyramid” leads from a hierarchical information and communication structure towards a highly cross-linked structure. The classic separation of the field level to cell and management level up to the factory level will become obsolete. The limiting factor for an extensive implementation of cloud platforms in production environments is located in missing standard interfaces between machinery, robots, production systems and the novel cloud infrastructures and services. Especially machinery without Ethernet-based communication interfaces cannot be integrated. To fill this gap we introduce our concept and three different connection scenarios for a connector layer in the use-case industrial control-as-a-service for cloud manufacturing. The scenarios include the utilization of Programmable Logic Controllers and micro-controllers as connector technologies as well as direct machine to cloud connection. We evaluate each scenario with a realistic experimental setup and present the results of our experiments.