The fourth industrial revolution has made way for the global transformation from traditional manufacturing and industrial practices to large scale automation using modern smart technologies like artificial intelligence and advanced robotics. In order to allow the diverse machines to carry out their complex tasks, a robust communication infrastructure that enables communication between the participants, while also fulfilling their respective needs, is paramount. Although state-of-the-art solutions tend to provide the network resources required for the operation of a production environment, frequent unplanned downtime of system or reduced network resources through hardware failures or other disruptive events are crucial challenges that still remain to be solved. This opens up opportunities to design a resilient wireless communication infrastructure which fulfills the requirements of different industrial applications, especially time-critical industrial applications like Automated Guided Vehicle (AGV) or process automation.
Within the RePro project, two distinct variants of resilience will be researched:
The proposed solution is realized in two different use cases:
This project is a cooperation between four institutes of TU Braunschweig and three industry partners.