Control as an Industrie 4.0 component: Network-adaptive applications for control

The industry is evolving towards a future of smart factories, aided by initiatives like Factories of the Future, Digital Factory and Industrie 4.0. The enabling technologies of this evolution are Industrial Internet of Things, Cyber-Physical Systems and Plug-and-Produce, among others. This paper discusses the idea of a control application following the philosophy of Industrie 4.0 components, and taking advantage of recent research on reliable control schemas. The aim is a control application that is deployable on different platforms, including cloud based, and that is aware of its environment, i.e. computing power, memory, network, etc. This control application will be able to adapt flexibly to given resource and connectivity conditions by shaping its control value matrix, reacting in runtime to changes in the environment.