The course aims to provide an overview on how ICT is contributing to radically change industrial production and, in general, automation. Since modern factory and process automation systems are distributed in nature, the course will mainly focus on communication technologies, analyzing how the peculiar constraints of control applications (about, e.g., dependability, determinism, maintainability) can be met. After briefly resuming the recent history of factory communications and presenting the state-of-the-art, some of the most promising next-generation solutions will be illustrated. Domains with similar requirements, like automotive and smart cities, will be considered as well.

Foundations of digital communication, computer network architectures, TCP/IP stack, and HTTP protocol.

1. Introduction to modern paradigms for production systems: from the Purdue model to Industry 4.0 and 5.0, reference architectural model industrie 4.0 (RAMI 4.0), administration shell. 2. Brief history of communication for automation: analog point-to-point links, digital serial interfaces, fieldbuses, industrial Ethernet. 3. Wired communication technologies: introduction to IEEE 802.1 time-sensitive networking (TSN), time synchronization, time-aware shaper (TAS), frame replication and elimination (FRER), Ethernet 10BASE-T1S/L. 4. Wireless communication technologies: introduction to IEEE 802.11 wireless local area networks (WLAN), Wi-Fi 4/5/6/7, RTS/CTS and NAV (DCF), QoS (EDCA), frame aggregation and block acknowledge, MLO. 5. Automotive networks: introduction to in-vehicle communication, controller area networks (CAN), bitwise arbitration, error globalization, feasibility analysis, CAN FD/XL, CANopen. 6. Process and environmental monitoring: wireless sensor networks (WSN), IEEE 802.15.4 low-rate wireless personal area network (LR-WPAN), time-slotted channel hopping (TSCH), 6TiSCH. 7. Application layer protocols: solutions for the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), CoAP, OPC-UA, MQTT, operating principles and code examples about the MQTT protocol. 8. Fundamentals of machine learning and how it can be applied to improve communication, artificial neural networks (ANN), digital twins for wired-wireless network infrastructures.

On site

Oral presentation

P.D.2-2 - March