Safety of fog-based industrial automation systems

Abstract

The Fog computing paradigm employing multiple technologies is expected to play a key role in a multitude of industrial applications by fulfilling futuristic requirements such as flexible and enhanced computing, storage, and networking capability closer to the field devices. While performance aspects of the Fog paradigm has been the central focus of researchers, safety aspects have not received enough attention so far. In this paper, we identify various safety challenges related to the Fog paradigm and provide specific safety design aspects as a step towards enhancing safety in industrial automation scenarios. We contextualize these ideas by invoking a distributed mobile robots use-case that can benefit from the use of the Fog paradigm.