Design for Low Latency and High Reliability: OPC-UA Based Production Line for Product Traceability and Customized Service

Abstract

With the growing popularity of edge computing and Industry 4.0, the Industrial Internet-of-Things (IIoT) has emerged as a promising alternative to improve the production efficiency of the manufacturing system. Among various intelligent manufacturing features, product traceability and customized service are highly desired, which not only enables the tracking of the end to end inventory to ensure high reliability, but also provides personalized characteristics to meet different customer demands. However, in tradition, such traceability or customized service are achieved at the cost additional time-consuming steps and hence incur more manufacturing cost. To address the aforementioned issues, we propose a low latency OPC-UA based IIoT system and apply that to the production line for product traceability and customized service. The designed OPC-UA is deployed at the edge gateway to effectively solve the data heterogeneity, support centralized control of network resources, and ensure low latency and high reliability of data transmission. In addition, the inter-communication mechanism among multiple devices on the same production line is improved to enable both flexibility and robustness. Experimental results on a demo production line show that the proposed architecture can help achieve both low latency and high reliability.