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Due to the growth of industrial Internet services, today's production environment is on the edge of a new era of innovations and changes. This is taking place through the convergence of the global industrial system with the power of advanced computing, analytics, low-cost sensing, and new levels of connectivity enabled by the Internet of Things (IoT). These innovations will bring higher efficiency, flexibility, and interoperability among industries, although they belong to different production ecosystems. This paper describes an IoT platform and the related prototypes developed within the project: Enabling Business-Based Internet of Things and Services (ebbits), with a focus on the industrial domain. Heterogeneous applications were deployed and tested, including a wireless sensor and actuator network for industrial machines monitoring and a radio-frequency-identification-based system for operator management, locating, and authorization, which also includes an interactive user interface for portable devices to visualize real-time information from physical-world devices. Moreover, tools for model-driven development are used to simplify the process of building IoT applications. Those developments are based on IoT middleware that is developed and deployed by the project to enable the seamless integration of heterogeneous technologies and processes into mainstream enterprise systems. This paper also presents the prototypal deployment of the developed prototypes in the car manufacturing industry.

Wireless in shop-floors is a bet: it outlines the possibility of making automation more flexible and to simplify plant reconfiguration. However, the specific context subtends several challenging requirements, which the available off-the-shelf solutions are not 100%-ready to cope with. By the way, the potential benefits of wireless for automation are so significant that it is worth investigating novel techniques to enforce the available wireless transceivers, so as to make them suitable for factories. The Italian regional project Wi-Fact is putting under close scrutiny the context of wireless automation to identify the most significant threats and proposing solutions to stem them. This paper take stock of the project achievements at its mid-term turning point.

Growing global competition, environmental concerns, legal and market requirements motivate production companies to strengthen their capability to monitor and control their factories. SCADA, MES, ERP and EAI provide limited and fragmented awareness on the behavior and performance of the manufacturing systems from the production, economic and environmental perspective. The introduction of wired or wireless sensor networks increases the available information for improved control, anomaly detection and condition monitoring on a local scale or with reference to specific systems. This paper presents a proposal for a holistic environmental conscious perspective of the factory, enabling identification and minimization of inefficiencies in the use of energy and resources, control of the environmental impact and maximization of manufacturing and economic performances.

The European funded Radically Innovative Mechatronics and Advanced Control Systems (RI-MACS) research project was initiated to address some of the challenges in the future automation systems. Its mission is to bring the innovation offered by the Information Technology (IT) domain into the production life cycle, improving some of the existing inflexibilities in typical manufacturing automation plants. In this paper, some of the key aspects of automation systems engineering that require changes to ensure future competitiveness are highlighted. An overview of current approaches to automation are reviewed in relation to wired and wireless networking, automation architectures, and design environments.

The evolution of automation in the manufacturing environment is rapidly moving towards Information Technology (it) standards and Open Systems based solutions. Besides, in order to realise a complete integration of all factory automation systems, that is one of the first steps in the implementation of the Computer Integrated Manufacturing (cim) technologies, final users and “system integrators” are implementing more and more solutions based on Integration Software Platforms.

The increasing demand and competition in the manufacturing automation market are changing the approach to CIM implementations. Integration and therefore Factory Networking Systems are playing a more important role.