A software defined hierarchical communication and data management architecture for industry 4.0

The Industry 4.0 paradigm alludes to a new industrial revolution where factories evolve towards digitalized and networked structures where intelligence is spread among the different elements of the production systems. Two key technological enablers to achieve the flexibility and efficiency sought for factories of the future are the communication networks and the data management schemes that will support connectivity and data distribution in Cyber-Physical Production Systems. Communications and data management must be built upon a flexible and reliable architecture to be able to efficiently meet the stringent and varying requirements in terms of latency, reliability and data rates demanded by industrial applications, and with particular attention on time-critical automation. To this aim, this paper proposes the use of heterogeneous communication technologies integrated in a hierarchical communications and data management architecture where decentralized and local management decisions are coordinated by a central orchestrator that ensures the efficient global operation of the system. Industrial applications are organized in different tiers where different management strategies are applied to satisfy their different requirements in terms of latency and reliability. The use of virtualization and softwarization technologies as RAN Slicing and Cloud RAN will allow to achieve the flexibility, scalability and adaptation capabilities required to support the high-demanding and diverse industrial environment.