Development of an Open, Modular Controller for Training in Emergent Automation Technologies

In the last decade, the 4th Industrial Revolution has brought new challenges and paradigms to the manufacturing industry in response to the consumers’ requirements demanding highly customisable and personalised products. New standards and technologies to help companies face this need emerged quickly, and the different stakeholders are trying to gain an edge over their competitors. Hence, new technologies are emerging, and training people for those technologies is necessary. One of the emerging technologies is the new generation of industrial controllers capable of running more complex and demanding software on the edge, such as multi-agent agent-based control systems. Consequently, it is necessary to have hardware for the trainees to practice and generate those competencies. This work, with an engineering and electronics aspect, proposes the development of a controller, with modularity and flexibility as the core ideas, that allows for the integration of open-source standards, usually followed by the proprietary technologies used in emergent factories and automation technologies. The implementation of this architecture led to the development of a prototype modular industrial controller that is, on average, a quarter of the cost of the new generation of industrial controllers. The developed controller was tested and validated using some educational kits.