Self-Commissioning Industrial IoT-Systems in Process Automation: A Reference Architecture

Distributed control systems are currently evolving towards Industrial Internet-of-Things (IIoT) systems. However, they still suffer from complex commissioning processes that incur high costs. Researchers have proposed several so-called "Plug and Produce" (PnP) approaches, where commissioning shall be largely automated, but they have suffered from semantic ambiguities and usually rely on proprietary information models. We propose a novel reference architecture for PnP in IIoT systems, which is based on OPC UA and PLCopen standards and can reduce industrial device commissioning times across vendor products to a few seconds. Our proof-of-concept implementation can handle more than 500 signals per millisecond during runtime, sufficient for most application scenarios.