We are witnessing a new industrial revolution, Industry 4.0 which brings increased productivity and flexibility, mass customization, reduced time-to-market, improved product quality, innovations and new business models. Although Europe has been undergoing a process of deindustrialization, 80% of its exports come from manufacturing, which is responsible for 33 million jobs. The European Commission has set as a target that 20% of value added should come from manufacturing.
Industry 4.0 requires the convergence of Operational and Information Technologies (OT & IT), which use different computation and communication technologies. Cloud Computing cannot be used for OT involving industrial applications since it cannot guarantee stringent non-functional requirements, e.g. dependability, trustworthiness and timeliness. Instead, a new computing paradigm, called Fog Computing, is envisioned as an architectural means to realize the IT/OT convergence.
Fog Computing for Robotics and Industrial Automation, FORA, was a European Training Network which focused on future industrial automation architectures and applications based on an emerging technology, called Fog Computing, that enables the design of new time-sensitive industrial applications. The project was an interdisciplinary, international, intersectoral network that aimed to train the next generation of researchers in Fog Computing with applicability to industrial automation and manufacturing during the period 2017-2021.
The FORA ETN project trained 15 interdisciplinary scientists to gain knowledge in both the Information Technology and Operation Technology domains and understand the demands of the industry that can have an impact at the European level. FORA’s researchers received integrated training across key areas necessary to fully realize the potential of Fog Computing for Industry 4.0 and moved between academic and industrial environments to promote interdisciplinary and intersectoral learning.
The FORA research objectives focused on: future industrial automation architectures and applications based on Fog Computing, deterministic virtualization and execution, deterministic wired and wireless communication, resource provisioning and resource management, Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), real-time data analytics and security. The result is an open architecture built on open source and open standards, e.g. Time-Sensitive Networking (TSN), OPC Unified Architecture (UA) and 5G. The research took place at the intersection of several research areas: Cloud Computing and Software Engineering, Industrial Automation and Real-Time Systems, and Machine Learning, Security and Safety.
