Industrial Cloud Automation for Interconnected Factories

In the next industrial revolution, called Industry 4.0, manufacturers are focusing on client-specific production and added-value products. For this purpose, factories need new key automation technologies with small extra engineering effort. To make factories smarter, a lot of researches in the literature deal with the digital technologies potential such as Cloud computing and communication networks. That said, there is still lack of concrete applications. This paper is aimed to present our work on implementing and evaluating Proficloud as a new technology suitable to connect distributed factories for remote control and management purpose. For concrete application, we have designed a drinking water distribution system emulator as demonstrator. Proficloud was chosen for its ability to interconnect plants and facilities over long distances. This is done by combining the internet backbone and Profinet, the well-known industrial protocol. In this work, a literature review of modern remote control as well as a methodology to deploy Proficloud technology is presented. The main objective is to give a first evaluation of Proficloud performances based on experimental results, with a focus on latency issues.