A Low-latency and Interoperable Industrial Internet of Things Architecture for Manufacturing Systems

Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) as an emerging and prospective paradigm, has great potential to significantly improve production efficiency of manufacturing systems. An open data exchange standard, namely OPCUA, has been proposed for the IIoT systems to provide semantic interoperability over heterogeneous devices. However, a mass of traditional devices that do not support OPC UA, are still operating in legacy automation systems. To address this problem, in this paper, we propose a three-layer IIoT architecture for manufacturing system, which combines OPC UA-based gateways and Time-Sensitive Software-Defined Networking (TSSDN) switches to realize the efficient and reliable communication. The OPC UA is adopted to realize the interoperability of heterogeneous devices and the TSSDN achieves centralized control of network resources and flexible configuration in real-time industrial networks. Finally, we design a smart factory test bed, to evaluate the applicability of the proposed system architecture, in which we implement the information model and data transmission based on OPC UA.