Towards Zero Factory Downtime: Edge Computing and SDN as Enabling Technologies
Keerthana Govindaraj, Dennis Grewe, Alexander Artemenko, Andreas Kirstaedter · 2018
Future factory automation systems are expected to process vast amounts of data and orchestrate complex cyber-physical components. Edge Computing (EC) is a promising approach to address the requirements set by upcoming industrial systems. While EC caters to the computation requirements, it requires a solution to perform flexible network management of these computation resources. Software-Defined Networking (SDN) is a promising candidate to tackle such challenges. While most of the related work on EC and SDN focuses on multimedia or automotive applications, this paper presents the relevance of both paradigms for industrial applications. By introducing two most prominent industrial use cases, namely proactive system surveillance and intelligent technical assistance, this paper discusses the challenges involved and proposes a solution space for realizing these applications using the combination of EC and SDN. Furthermore, it presents future research directions regarding the combination of both paradigms in the context of factory automation.