JoWUA

Abstract

One of the most interesting applications of Industry 4.0 paradigm is enhanced process control. Traditionally, process control solutions based on Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) consider a top-down view where processes are represented as executable high-level descriptions. However, most times industrial processes follow a bottom-up model where processes are executed by low-level devices which are hard-programmed with the process to be executed. Thus, high-level components only may supervise the process execution as devices cannot modify dynamically their behavior. Therefore, in this paper we propose a vertical CPS-based solution (including a reference and a functional architecture) adequate to perform enhanced process control in Industry 4.0 scenarios with a bottom-up view. The proposed solution employs an event-driven service-based architecture where control is performed by means of finite state machines. Furthermore, an experimental validation is provided proving that in more than 97% of cases the proposed solution allows a stable and effective control.