Cloud Computing for Industrial Automation Systems - A Comprehensive

Overview

Omid Givehchi1 , Henning Trsek1 , and Juergen Jasperneite1,2

1
inIT - Institute Industrial IT, Ostwestfalen-Lippe University of Applied Sciences, D-32657 Lemgo,
Germany {omid.givehchi, henning.trsek, juergen.jasperneite}@hs-owl.de
2
Fraunhofer IOSB-INA Application Center Industrial Automation, D-32657 Lemgo, Germany
juergen.jasperneite@iosb-ina.fraunhofer.de

Abstract many enterprises worldwide due to its flexibility and many

Cloud computing has recently emerged as a new com-
puting paradigm in many application areas comprising
office and enterprise systems. It offers various solutions
to provide a dynamic and flexible infrastructure to host
computing resources and deliver them as a service on-
demand. Since industrial automation systems of the future
have to be adaptable and agile, cloud computing can be
considered as a promising solution for this area. However,
the requirements of industrial automation systems differ
significantly from the office and enterprise world.
This paper provides an overview of the latest concepts
of cloud computing technology for industrial automation.
Existing works are categorized based on the levels of au-
tomation systems and research gaps are discussed based
on these findings. A general cloud model for automation
is derived from existing proposals by refining them fur-
ther. This cloud model will offer automation functions as
services from a dynamic infrastructure.
1. Introduction
Today, automation systems are facing fast growing
market demands where agility and flexibility in produc-
tion plants is needed. In addition, over the next years,
the fourth industrial revolution will grow based on “intel-
ligent” production. The main focus for Industry 4.0 are
smart objects, autonomous products and decision making
processes [19] using new technologies from Information
Technology (IT) domain.
Cloud computing, as a new trend from the IT area,
might become an enabler for these future automation sys-
tems, because it has recently influenced many areas such
as office and enterprise systems. Cloud computing has
rapidly emerged as an accepted computing paradigm in
other advantages [1]. This poses two main questions: Is
there any potential to adapt this technology for usage in in-
dustrial automation and why should manufacturing com-
panies care about using it in their automation systems?
This work aims at analyzing these questions and provid-
ing detailed answers in order to identify the existing gaps
where this new technology can provide solutions for in-
dustrial automation systems.
The main goal of this paper is to provide an overview of
cloud computing in automation by discussing current re-
search activities. Therefore, cloud computing will be first
evaluated as a solution to implement a global automation
architecture by analyzing existing works in this context.
These works will be categorized with respect to the dif-
ferent levels of the traditional automation pyramid hierar-
chy. After this, the current state and future work will be
determined as a part of this work. Based on already pro-
posed architectures for future automation systems, these
architectures are extended accordingly, because the exist-
ing proposals are limited to very abstract models for the
future.
2. Related Work
Basically, existing works related to cloud computing
in automation could be categorized based on their focus
on each individual automation level. Most of these works
aim at migrating functions and services from the common
hierarchical automation architecture to a flat architecture.
2.1. Enterprise Management and Manufacturing Exe-
cution Level
Among the works related to the higher levels of the
automation especially enterprise management level, Xu
et al. [20] discussed some of the essential features for
cloud computing with regard to apply them in manufactur-

978-1-4799-0864-6/13/$31.00 ©2013 IEEE

ing management systems. ”Cloud Manufacturing” is pro-
posed as a business model to transform traditional man-
ufacturing business model and create intelligent factory
networks that encourage effective collaborations. Simi-
larly, Tao et al. [17] combined existing advanced man-
ufacturing models with cloud computing technology to
achieve a new computing and service-oriented manufac-
turing model, named cloud manufacturing (CMfg).
Pérez et al. [13] proposed a new manufacturing
paradigm called “Cloud agile manufacturing”. The main
aim for this work is to offer industrial automation func-
tions as a service to enable the users in higher levels to
access available functionalities of the automation system
with minimum complexity.
Gilart-Iglesias in [6] proposed a service model for de-
livering industrial machinery as a service to incorporate
them easily during production process in order to facil-
itate self-management and proactive management of the
business logic for which it is responsible.
2.2. Process Control Level
For the process control level, several research projects
especially related to Service Oriented Architectures
(SOA) have been done already. Related to these works,
Delsing et al. [3] proposed an approach to migrate from
legacy industrial systems to the next generation of SOA-
based automation systems.Gerach et al. [5] proposed a
private cloud model to host and deliver SIMATIC PCS7
as a generic Distributed Control System (DCS).
The IMC-AESOP project [10] is another interesting
work which aims to develop SOA-based approach for
next generation of SCADA/DCS systems targeting pro-
cess control applications. Similarly, Combs et al. [2] an-
alyzed migration of the SCADA systems to cloud com-
puting. Consequently, SCADA providers and users can
reduce costs and achieve more scalability. Furthermore,
Web-oriented Automation System (WOAS) [12] project
aims to research a new architecture for automation sys-
tems based on web and cloud technologies. Staggs et al.
[16] proposed a system including a computing cloud hav-
ing at least one data storage unit and one processing unit
as a simple demonstrator for an industrial automation ap-
plication. Beside the works in this level, still concrete im-
plementation and evaluation for the proposals are missing
within most of the works.
2.3. Control and Field Level
Related to the lower levels of automation, i. e. control
and field levels, number of existing works are mainly lim-
ited due to the tough requirements of these levels. These
levels basically consist of physical devices and functions.
These functions can be offered as services from the cloud.
Therefore, the main goal for the works related to these
levels is to provide interactions between the cyberspace
(cloud) and the physical world (real field devices).
A cloud solution has been introduced in [11] which
shows an application to connect sensors and actuators in-
side wind turbines to a cloud infrastructure.
There are several solutions related to the sensor cloud
which are described in [8] for general purposes and IT
applications. Most of these works focused on connecting
devices with M2M standards and interfaces to the cloud
and therefore local cloud solutions, e. g. private clouds,
were not addressed.
A first use case for engineering applications as a ser-
vice has been investigated in [7]. The main focus was to
deliver engineering applications from the cloud to the user
without having installation and maintenance efforts.
2.4. Summary
After analyzing the state of the art, a lack of projects
and research works in the area of cloud computing for au-
tomation was noticed, especially lower levels of automa-
tion are not sufficiently addressed. The main reason for
this could be the leakage of information about this buz-
zword in automation industry which is known as a conser-
vative domain against new technologies.
Since cloud computing is one of the potential solu-
tions for integration between different automation levels,
the necessity for research to provide integration between
available applications must be considered. The summary
of existing works is shown in Table 1. As viewed, some of
the requirements, e. g. real-time and security are not suf-
ficiently addressed and remain as open research questions
for the future.
3. Proposed Architectures for Industrial Au-
tomation
During recent years, industrial automation witnessed
the new demands and trends in different areas. First so-
lutions for agile and smart manufacturing and other new
trends have appeared. Field devices become more in-
telligent by embedding new functionalities inside IO de-
vices or sensors and actuators. These trends might re-
quire the definition of new automation architectures dif-
fering from the current hierarchical automation pyramid.
Among these newly proposed architectures, Vogel-Heuser
et. al. [18] introduced a new architecture as global in-
formation architecture for industrial automation. It con-
sists of two main layers presented with two cones which
are placed between business and technical processes. The
lower layer represents the migration of field and control
levels in traditional pyramid including devices and func-
tionalities, whereas the upper layer represents the the pro-
cess control and management levels on top of the control
level in the automation pyramid. An information model is
inserted between these two layers to standardize the infor-
mation exchange in a structured way for achieving verti-
cal and horizontal integration between devices and entities
during the whole engineering life-cycle.
At the end of this proposal, the authors described the
new model as a short motivation and introduction for a

Enterprise management and MES
Requirements [20] [17] [13] [6] [14]
Cost Reduction
Adaptability
Information integration
Real-time capability
Reliability
Scalability
Security
Table 1. Categorization of related work and related projects
Figure 1. Global Information Architecture
with use of Cloud Computing [15], based on
[18]
huge change in automation. They promised a big im-
provement in engineering life-cycle and more flexible op-
erations. Based on this, cloud computing technology has
been applied in [15] as a solution to implement this newly
proposed architecture for automation. The architecture is
shown in Figure 1 and was implemented using an exam-
ple application. Special automation functions and services
can be offered directly as SaaS from the IT-cloud as well
as Automation-Cloud. Alternatively, a PaaS is used as a
automation platform to deliver specific needs for integra-
tion, e. g. process logs and plug and play parameters. The
authors conclude that this solution resulted in an improved
information flow.
As shown in Figure 1, automation cloud (AT-Cloud) is
offered to provide functions and services in lower levels
and the IT-Cloud hosts applications and services in up-
per levels of the automation. Integration between these
two infrastructures are provided by an Information Model.
Considering basic cloud computing features and architec-
ture, the Information Model could be replaced with a ser-
vice bus and can be shifted to the cloud as displayed in
Figure 2. As a result of this migration, along with the
definition of standard services, it is possible to replace IT
and Automation clouds with a single cloud proposal il-
lustrated in Figure 2. The integration between the cloud
Category
Process control Control and field
[3] [5] [10] [2] [15] [12] [16] [9] [11] [4] [7]
and real devices will be enabled by encapsulating services
and functions inside delivery standards. In our proposed
architecture this is introduced as Everything-as-a-Service
(XaaS) for automation.
As shown in Figure 2, the control and field levels still
exist traditionally based on the well-known automation
pyramid, since these levels are covering all physical de-
vices on the factory floor. However, the upper levels have
been changed. Since they are basically providing non-
physical functions and services, it is possible to migrate
them into the cloud. Each group of functions could be
realized as individual cloud unit which addresses a partic-
ular automation level. These individual units are shown as
standalone boxes for each group of functions in Figure 2.
Consequently, these units are consisting of different ap-
plications in each level as sub-units. For instance, process
control functions is including applications which deliver
these kinds of functions as standard services to other units.
All units are connected via a standard service bus which
is offered from Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) tech-
nology to provide integration and interoperability between
different objects.
The control level is divided into two parts in this archi-
tecture. The first part is the physical control level which
includes common PLCs close to the technical process to
be able to provide the highest performance for control
loops. The second part of the control level migrated to
the cloud. It offers control functions directly to field de-
vices from the cloud with a reduced performance. This
approach could be implemented as soft controllers which
provide control functions via the network.
4. Conclusion and Outlook
In this paper, solutions based on cloud computing tech-
nology have been analyzed in order to find their poten-
tials for a deployment in industrial automation systems.
With the rise of applying Information Technologies such
as the Internet of Things, Service Oriented Architectures
and mobile computing in industrial automation, there is a
further need for a platform to provide information integra-
tion, a repository and analysis for the connected devices
(things). Cloud computing could be a possible solution
for this reason. On the other hand, this technology could
be assumed as a solution for implementation of newly pro-
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