Software defined industry automation networks
Khandakar Entenam Unayes Ahmed, Nazmus Shaker Nafi, Jan Olaf Blech, Mark A Gregory, Heinrich Schmidt · 2017
The recent advancement of industry automation is underpinned by the continuous development of the industrial network. This exponential growth is driving the fourth generation industry revolution (FGIR). To meet the requirement of FGIR, there is an ongoing evolution of industrial network from Fieldbus to Ethernet that has emerged a new opportunity to integrate Software Defined Networking (SDN) technique. In this paper, we propose a network architecture called Software Defined Industry Automation Network (SDIAN) to enable highly flexible and robust network. The proposed architecture promises to provide real-time communication, online dynamic configuration and flexible adaptation to changes in the connections and locations of the manufacturing entities. To validate the merit of the proposed framework, we also report on an ongoing testbed implementation on an experimental food processing plant demonstrator featuring Raspberry PIs (RPIs) instead of traditional Programmable Logic Controllers (PLCs). Our demonstrator exemplifies the characteristics of SDIAN.