Cloud-Fog Automation: Vision, Enabling Technologies, and Future Research Directions

The Industry 4.0 digital transformation envisages future industrial systems to be fully automated, including the control, upgrade, and configuration processes of a large number of heterogeneous wired/wireless interconnected devices in Industrial Internet of Things environments. Most of the industrial automation systems today are based on the traditional International Society of Automation (ISA)-95 model, with some recently transitioned to Cloud Automation systems. Latest developments in network connectivity technologies, artificial intelligence, and Cloud/Fog computing technologies have motivated us to rethink the ISA-95 model. In this article, we propose a vision that aims to migrate most of the computational and automation tasks closer to the ground, which we term the collaborative “Cloud-Fog Automation” paradigm. We perform a comprehensive survey of the state-of-the-art and formulate the three pillars of this vision: Deterministic connectivity, deterministic connected intelligence, and deterministic networked computing. In each of these pillars, we review their latency and reliability, security, and functional safety requirements and challenges. Finally, we articulate and highlight key future research directions to realize this vision.