An Industrial Communication Platform for Industry 4.0 - case study

Actual trends in the industry can be described by the Industry 4.0 manifest. Characteristic features of Industry 4.0 components’ communication are interoperability and an ability of autonomous communication with other components. This article examines state-of-art technologies which could provide an environment for such communication and proposes a study of Industrial Communication Platform based on open and platform neutral communication. The Asset Administration Shell concept, which represents Industry 4.0 component, is realized by OPC Unified Architecture which already bears services which fulfill some of demanded functional requirements. Functionalities e.g. auto-discovery provided by OPC Unified Architecture Local Discovery Service with Multicast Extensions combining with an Aggregating Server are proposed for creating an asset which could automatically aggregates other assets connected to network. An innovation presented in this work is MQTT version 5 feature response topic, which could enable request-response features in publish-subscribe communication model. What could enable all valuable OPC Unified Architecture services over publish-subscribe communication. An ambition of this study is to leverage proposed structure of the Industrial Communication Platform to become a base for a testbed at Slovak University of Technology in Bratislava.