Toward Industrial IoT: Integrated Architecture of an OPC UA Synergy Platform

Recently, the manufacturing industry has revolutionized with ‘smart manufacturing’ and ‘Industry 4.0’, and with the development of the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), increasing number of physical objects can access network services. However, critical issues such as real-time communication, interoperability, and interlinking of internet and industrial devices are yet to be addressed. These issues arise from the problem of interconnectivity between smart manufacturing systems and non-semantic industrial equipment. Therefore, we referred to ISO/IEC 30141, a standard IoT reference architect document, to solve the interconnection problem and bridge the gap between the Internet and industry. Furthermore, we proposed a four-domain integrated architecture that divides the manufacturing system into user, cloud service, sensing & controlling, and device domains. The proposed architecture is validated by constructing the applicable industrial pick-and-place testbed for the manufacturing system. Thus, this testbed can serve as guideline to examine the state of the art of the OPC UA PubSub based protocol in addition to several other types of protocol approaches.