19th IEEE International Conference on
Factory Communication Systems (WFCS 2023)

Tilo Merlin is Senior Principal Engineer at ABB Measurement & Analytics division with business area process automation. In his role as platform manager for instrumentation, he oversees industrial communication from early technology development up to market introduction of smart field instruments for chemical industry, oil & gas, water/waste water and applications in power generation. He started as embedded software developer for temperature and interface products and was one of the known faces behind fieldbus technology in early 2000. He stands behind many successful ABB products, such as first fully redundant and digital remote I/O system for installation in hazardous area zone 1, first head mounted temperature transmitter with Foundation Fieldbus communication, first industrial autonomous wireless sensor powered by thermal energy harvesting.

LinkedIn profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tilo-merlin-53157b13/.

Ethernet is established in factory automation, in particular motion applications, since many years. Anyway, in process industry, Ethernet stops on the level of controllers and distributed control system. Since invention of APL (advanced physical layer) as one branch of the SPE family of standards (single pair Ethernet), a run of Ethernet in the field has started. Why was APL such an important step and what will and could Ethernet change on sensor/actor level in process industry? What are characteristics of process industry and where it goes in line with nature of Ethernet - and internet connectivity, TCP/IP networks, IoT, etc. - and where not? Still more than 10 years after Stuxnet is cyber security not everywhere adequately considered or systems could become safe - but unusable.

Since 2001 Roberto Verdone is Full Professor in Telecommunications at the University of Bologna. In 2001 he founded a research group (Radio Networks) working on i) Radio Resource Management for mobile systems, ii) MAC, routing and topology of wireless sensor networks, iii) architectures and technologies for the IoT. In particular, he is currently active in the field of the Industrial IoT, 5G and B5G systems using THz communications, and UAV-aided mobile radio networks. Since 2020 he is Director of the CNIT National Laboratory of Wireless Communications, WiLab, participated by about 110 researchers. Since 2021 he is also co-Director of the WiLab-Huawei Joint Innovation Center on “Intelligent IoT for 6G”. He published about 200 research papers, on IEEE journals/conferences.

LinkedIn profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/roberto-verdone/.

Industrial applications set a number of challenging requirements to Factory Networks in terms of latency, reliability, throughput, security and other KPIs. Some of them can be fulfilled by 5G solutions, others are too stringent and require more advanced technologies that most probably will be part of the 6G ecosystem. This speech will start analysing the requirements of some relevant industrial applications and use cases, and will discuss how they can be met by 5G solutions. Then, the expected characteristics of 6G will be anticipated, which can be of support to the development of factory networks. The speech will alternate conceptual technical discussions supported by numerical analyses, and pragmatic considerations based on on-field experience. The visions of relevant projects on industrial networks conducted under EU or private funding contexts will be presented.

Alois Zoitl holds a PhD degree in Electrical Engineering with focus on dynamic reconfiguration of real-time con-strained control applications and a Master degree in Electrical Engineering with the focus on distributed industrial automation systems from Vienna University of Technology. Currently he is a Professor for cyber-physical systems for engineering and production at the Johannes Kepler University, Linz. Before that he was the scientific research group leader for Industrial Automation at the research institute fortiss in Munich, Germany. Before that he was the head of the research field Distributed Intelligent Automation Systems (Odo Struger Laboratory) at the Auto-mation and Control Institute (ACIN), Vienna University of Technology. He is co-author of more than 220 publications (3 books, 8 book chapters, 24 journal articles) and the co-inventor of 4 patents in the mentioned areas.

Alois Zoitl conducted and lead several industry funded R&D projects as well as coordinated and participated in several public funded (national as well as European) R&D projects. He is a founding member of the open source initiatives Eclipse 4diac, providing a complete IEC 61499 solution, and OpENer. Furthermore, he is a senior member of the IEEE and since 2009 he is an active member of the IEC SC65B/WG15 for the distributed automation standard IEC 61499. He was named convenor of the group in May 2015.

LinkedIn profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alois-zoitl-a9b05725/.

The importance of software for the functioning of machines and systems is growing steadily. The need for networking among each other as well as with higher-level systems (keyword IoT) is also increasing. This leads to a constantly increasing development effort and the associated costs.

This calls for new methods that allow the increasing software development effort to be tamed. One method is IEC 61499, which was created to simplify and improve the development of control programs for distributed automation systems. IEC 61499 defines a domain-specific modeling language that offers solutions for the demands of distributed functionality, adaptivity and improved software quality in control technology. This is not a new language, but a consistent extension of the existing IEC 61131-3. Recent studies have shown that IEC 61499 can indeed help to reduce development effort.

However uptake of IEC 61499 is still slow. One reason for this is that while IEC 61499 was designed with distribution and communication as first-class citizens in mind, it requires completely different approaches to communication than classical factory communication systems.

This talk will provide an overview of IEC 61499 and how it can be used to develop distributed control applications. It will be shown which features of IEC 61499 can help to reduce the development effort. Based on this, the communication requirements of IEC 61499-based systems will be examined and common misconceptions will be clarified. The presentation concludes with open research topics for the WFCS community with respect to future communication systems for distributed and adaptive production systems based on IEC 61499.