Concept and Evaluation of a Technology-independent Data Collection Architecture for Industrial Automation

The fourth industrial revolution, Industrie 4.0, motivates research to adapt concepts from Internet of Things and Cyber-Physical Systems to automation. Focus is placed on integrating all data sources, from sensors and actuators to management software, to achieve interoperability of heterogeneous systems. To assure data integration, a data collection architecture that guarantees data access from all systems, including legacy devices, is needed. This allows companies to gradually evolve to Industrie 4.0 deployments while still keeping their mission-critical systems online. A middleware-based architecture is a valid answer to the presented challenges. Numerous communication technologies can act as a middleware, all with different advantages and disadvantages. A technology-independent implementation ensures that a lock-in to a specific technology is prevented and makes the architecture more robust and adequate for various use-cases. This work contributes with a concept of a middleware-based data collection architecture, which is independent of specific communication protocols. Therefore, a protocol-agnostic communication interface is developed. A technology comparison summarizes relevant protocols in the field of industrial automation. The concept is subsequently implemented for a case-study and compared to a peer-to-peer legacy approach. Results show that the concept is feasible, as well as that it reduces complexity and effort for implementation and migration of such communication systems. Future work should focus on further developing the concepts, in order to support additional communication protocols and verify the suitability of the architecture in scenarios with a multitude of technologies.