Internet of Things for Industrial Automation -- Challenges and Technical Solutions

Using internet of things (IoT) to connect things, service, and people for intelligent operations has been discussed and deployed in many industry domains such as smart city, smart energy, healthcare, food and water tracking, logistics and retail, and transportation. However, scarce information is available for IoT usage in industrial automation domain for reliable and collaborative automation with respect to e.g., enabling scalable collaboration between heterogeneous devices and systems, offering predictable and fault-tolerant real-time closed-loop control, and inclusion of intelligent service features from edge devices to the cloud. In this paper, we will clarify the specific quality attribute constraints within industrial automation, present specific industrial IoT challenges due to these constraints, and discuss the potentials of utilizing some technical solutions to cope with these challenges.