The world is changing rapidly with globalisation and individualisation of products driving the whole manufacturing industry towards more flexible and standardised automation solutions. To address these challenges, manufacturing systems will have to incorporate flexible and adaptable control strategies that can quickly and efficiently handle consistent and deterministic delivery of data from sensors to controllers and to actuators. The data exchanged between these components is critical in controlling any manufacturing process and it is imperative that interference or limitation of this exchange is minimised.
At the same time, the emergence of the Internet of Things (IoT) is driving the need for networked, time-aware systems in all sectors of the economy. In the industrial market, evolution of the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) will increase the amount of data harvested through distributed networks, requiring new standards for managing and transferring critical and non-critical information.
The latest set of IEEE 802.1 Time Sensitive Networking (TSN) standards represents the next evolution of standard Ethernet technologies, targeted to meet these new market demands. By bringing industrial-grade robustness and real-time capabilities to Ethernet, TSN removes the need for physical separation of critical and non-critical communication networks, thus allowing open data exchange between operations and enterprise.
As society develops gradually towards an integrated digital-human workforce, the IIoT will redefine the new types of jobs to be created and will reshape the nature of the work. Currently, Europe is responsible for 23% of global IoT spending which is predicted to grow to 891 billion EUR in 2022. Out of all IoT devices, industrial devices are accounting for a third but they make up for 80% of the expenditure and the ratio is expected to remain the same in the coming years. Being the third largest market for IoT after the Asia-Pacific and North American regions, Europe is forecasted to see the fastest growth in market size and revenue from these three leading regions at an annual growth rate of 15.7% through to 2025.
As such, in order to prepare for the future, there is currently a strong need for Europe to introduce significantly improved methods and technologies that will contribute to the development of next generation of digital manufacturing applications which in turn will require next-generation methods for monitoring both information and operational technologies.
A TSN enabled communication technology incorporated into delay-constrained Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS), Robotics applications and Digital Twins will be at the focal point of this IIoT growth and will contribute to real-time, intelligent and autonomous access, collection, analysis and exchange of process, product and service information within the industrial environment with the purpose of optimising the overall production value.
The growth of the European IIoT market will be enabled by supporting the development of next generation digital manufacturing applications as follows:
CPS: The current and future CPSes will face a wide variety of challenges, including effective integration of new manufacturing technologies for an efficient production of highly customised products. Such applications and services may demand various levels of performance of their CPS network infrastructure, from strict and deterministic to more lenient or probabilistic ones, for system agility, safety, stability and resilience. There is therefore, an increasing interest in modelling and analysing of the CPS network infrastructure and in advancing its design and applications in order to fully adapt to the complexity of communication and automation of industrial controls in future.
Robotics: Robotics is transforming our society by providing solutions to major concerns that we are facing nowadays, such as climate change, sustainable transport, renewable energy and coping with an ageing population. Robotics has the clear potential to provide better living conditions and is essential for increased productivity and competitiveness. One of the main problems in robotics is that there is no such thing as a standard communication protocol, but a variety of them. Having a unique standard protocol would improve the interoperability between robots and facilitate the robotic component integration, which is still one of the main hurdles in the robot building process.
With the growing integration in robotics of Artificial Intelligence (AI), computer vision or predictive maintenance, there is an increasing need of sensors and actuators streaming high bandwidth data in real-time. The information provided by these sensors is often integrated in the control system or it needs to be monitored in real- time. By adding real-time capabilities to Ethernet, a TSN enabled technology will improve the access to the robot components which is especially important for predictive maintenance, reconfigurability or adaptability.
Digital Twins: Digital twins have been gathering attention as a means of linking the real world with the cyberspace thanks to progress in information and communication technology (ICT). The use of digital twins makes it possible to analyse current conditions, make predictions and simulate in cyberspace various scenarios with respect to physical things. In order to create a digital twin for a virtual modelling of CPSes, there must be however a clear pathway to collect, process and control the data in real-time. A TSN enabled technology will ensure a guaranteed latency, which means the pathways between the process sensors collecting the data and the analytical computers processing the data are unimpeded – enabling a guaranteed data delivery.
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