Seven open-source interconnection strategies for empowering Industry 4.0

Industry 4.0 insights

• Industry 4.0 projects can be initiated without full automation. Interconnection strategies allow cost-effective digitization, unlocking optimization and improvement opportunities.
• Selecting the right edge device is crucial for successful data centralization. It ensures smooth communication, data transformation and effective storage system interconnection.
• Open-source tools provide valuable resources for Industry 4.0 projects. They enable cost-effective implementation and testing before committing to more advanced solutions.

The first steps of any Industry 4.0 project often go through the stage of automation and digitization of processes. The automation stage is generally well known and consists of the implementation of control systems and monitoring systems.

When this implementation is done with the right technologies, the step to digitization is imminent. This favors the implementation of any Industry 4.0 project within the organization. However, this step becomes very expensive for the economic investment as well as all the stages involved for it to be implemented correctly.

There is a general perception it is necessary to have a robust automation and control system to be able to carry out Industry 4.0 projects. That being economically unfeasible to automate the entire process, they consider it as an impediment to start their digital transformation and implementation stage.

However, there are several strategies that allow manufacturers digitizing processes without the need to fully automate them and at a lower cost. This allows finding the optimization and improvement insights that are the spearhead to achieve the organization’s objectives.

Information systems elements. Courtesy: Frenkel

These series of steps are known as “interconnection strategies.” There are seven strategies that allow engineers to extract information in a non-invasive way for storage and processing.

1. Identify the questions you want to answer

The first step, being the most important of all, corresponds to the definition of the purpose and objective of implementing such an interconnection strategy. The necessary questions need to be asked to identify what information is relevant to the process and the organization’s objectives. Some of these questions include:

• What needs to be known or understood about the process?

• Is traceability of the whole process or only some parts of the process needed?

• What are the most relevant key performance indicators (KPIs) and how are they calculated?

• What type of visualization is the most appropriate to view the information?

• How often is a summary of the information required?

• Does this data currently exist and is it digitized?

Once these answers are available, it is possible to identify the elements that allow obtaining the information of interest, and if it is not available, it is necessary to create it.

2. Identify the information sources

The information can come from various sources, from simple control systems using programmable logic controllers (PLCs), as well as more complex and interconnected systems such as supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems, servers, external applications, manual signal acquisition and more.

Distribution systems elements. Courtesy: Frenkel

It also is very important to identify the source, data type and frequency. Also in many cases, the information needed is non-existent, so it is necessary to install sensors and previous processes to acquire such data. These systems are known as “information systems.”

3. Identify extraction protocols

Each system has its own communication protocol, so it is important to consider an intermediate point between the “information systems” and the “centralized system” for later on. In the past, for different technological and commercial reasons, it was customary for companies to have their own communication protocols, and therefore these protocols were not compatible with devices of another brand or manufacturer.

This led to the need to have only devices of the same brand or manufacturer. However, over the years, companies have reached agreements to use universal protocols, which has greatly favored the interconnection of systems.

Centralized and storage systems elements. Courtesy: Frenkel

In order to achieve a correct interconnection between systems, the objective must be to unify all serial protocols to universal network protocols, so their extraction is simple and homogeneous. For this purpose, additional equipment, such as protocol converters, must be considered for cases where the system cannot do it natively.

The physical media that will be used to transmit the information, such as fiber optic copper cabling or the use of radio frequency, must also be considered. Currently, in an architecture for industrial systems, the OPC UA output protocol allows a correct interconnection between systems.

4. Selecting the right edge device

The edge device is the device in charge of centralizing, transforming, and cleaning the information obtained from the “information systems.” To this end, it must be able to communicate in the communication protocols previously identified, as well as having the necessary ports to physically interconnect to the networks.

In general, it must be connected through an Ethernet port to the operational technology (OT) network and through another port to the information technology (IT) network. Depending on the number of variables and the communication protocols, the hardware and operating system capacity must be selected.

Processing systems elements. Courtesy: Frenkel

The edge device can be either the “centralized system” or the “storage system” if it has the necessary resources. However, it is recommended the “centralized or storage system” be a dedicated server for information storage and processing. Therefore, the edge device serves as extract transform load (ETL) for the “centralized system.”

5. Create interconnection topology

Once the elements containing the information have been identified, the next step is to develop the topology that will allow all systems to communicate to a centralized system. Allowing the extraction of the information for further processing.

It is important to remember that, if necessary, installing additional equipment to change the serial communication protocols to the network, the installation of switches to distribute the network, as well as fiber optics converters to interconnect the systems over long distances, among other infrastructure and network equipment, should be considered.

Do not forget to check in detail the configuration of the equipment to avoid issues of duplicity of IPs, mac address, incompatibility problems and cybersecurity. This set of tools and devices is known as the distribution system.

6. Centralize the information

Having the topology in place, it is possible to start with the extraction of information from the “information systems” and centralize the data in one or several “storage systems.” For example, each area could have its own centralized system or storage and at the same time have another one at a higher level that centralizes the summarized information of each area. With the intention of having information at a local level focused on the plant and at a global level focused on the management of the organization.

NIG open-source server architecture. Courtesy: Frenkel

Once all the infrastructure is in place to extract the information, the next step is to organize it in a way that facilitates subsequent analysis.

7. Processing the information

Once all the information is available and centralized, the most fruitful stage of the process begins. This is the moment in which it is possible to quantitatively answer the questions asked in the first step, and they are not only answered once, but also throughout the rest of the process. It is possible to obtain a near real-time analysis that enables important decisions to be made based on the data.

Once the engineer has the available information and how it relates to the organization, it’s time to search for improvement and optimization opportunities. Many times, these improvements are identified from the creation of a dashboard that reflects the status of the process in real time, where anomalies to be corrected are visually noted.

In other cases, technological tools such as data science and artificial intelligence techniques can be implemented to find hidden patterns within the process and propose solutions to correct or improve them.

Different types of open-source or free access tools are available

There are several open-source or free access tools that can help engineers achieve their objectives. However, being open source does not mean they are not secure or they do not have high performance to be implemented in industrial problems, but in many cases, they fulfill the purpose. Likewise, they can be used to effectively perform a proof of concept (PoC). If a more rigorous tool is required, the paid versions can be purchased or a new tool can be developed, but with the objective already tested and validated. This saves many hours of work and engineering.

Among these tools, to mention a few, is the famous programming program in flows and events, which is often used as an ETL for various IoT and Industry 4.0 projects. For the topic of storage, users can take advantage of databases that specialize in time series, so they are widely used in this type of processes.

There are several visualization programs that allow implementing complete and transcendent projects with limited resources, so it is not necessary to have a robust infrastructure to venture into Industry 4.0.
There is no single solution to a problem, but there are several methods to solve it. However, the most optimal solution depends on the needs and objectives of each client.

Luis Enrique Noguera Gil is an Industry 4.0 and technological innovation project manager at Frenkel.

LEARNING OBJECTIVES

• Understand the importance of automating and digitizing Industry 4.0 projects.
• Learn about the seven strategies for empowering Industry 4.0 with open-source tools.
• Learn how these strategies are evolving and can help engineers do their jobs better.

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