Date of Award

8-16-2024

Document Type

Open Access Thesis

Department

Mechanical Engineering

First Advisor

Ramy Harik

Abstract

The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) movement has birthed technologies that enable the fusing of physical and digital environments. However, the extensive number of available options for industrial communication and data formatting has remained a barrier to achieving digital knowledge synonymy in industry. There have been previous attempts to establish standards for industrial connectivity and communication, but legacy machines, as well as custom and non-proprietary devices, still face issues communicating data with other manufacturing equipment. To address these challenges, the Industrial Internet of Things initiative has led to the creation of the Plug and Produce (PnP) concept to facilitate the smooth commissioning of industrial systems without the necessity for intensive manual configuration from system integrators. This thesis aims to apply the PnP concept to the Future Factories manufacturing testbed at the University of South Carolina’s McNair Aerospace Center to connect the various hardware and software components that interact within the manufacturing system. The architecture of the PnP systems consists of several protocol-agnostic Agent Gateways (AGs) that connect to the various manufacturing systems. These AGs acquire and aggregate the process data from the various data sources and translate them to the OPC UA framework. Utilizing the information modeling features of the OPC UA framework, the AGs can declare the capabilities and characteristics of the manufacturing systems to IIoT applications. The AG then pushes the process data to a central Ignition Gateway (IG) platform to enable widespread connectivity, data availability, and application development between different manufacturing facilities and systems.

Rights

© 2024, Theodros Abraham Tarekegne

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