10th International Congress on Information and Communication Technology

Authors - Gareth Gericke, Rangith B. Kuriakose, Herman J. Vermaak
Abstract - Communication architectures are demonstrating their significance in the development landscape of the Fourth industrial revolution. Nonetheless, the progress of architectural development lags behind that of the Fourth industrial revolution itself, resulting in subpar implementations and research gaps. This paper examines the prerequisites of Smart Manufacturing and proposes the utilization of a novel communication architecture to delineate a pivotal element, information appropriateness, showcasing its efficient application in this domain. Information appropriateness, leverages pertinent information within the communication flow at a machine level facilitating real-time monitoring, decision-making, and control over production metrics. The metrics scrutinized herein include production efficiency, bottleneck mitigation, and network intelligence, while accommodating architectural scalability. These metrics are communicated and computed at a machine level to assess the efficacy of a communication architecture at this level, while also investigating its synergistic relationship across other manufacturing tiers. Results of this ongoing study shed insights into data computation and management at the machine level and demonstrate an effective approach for handling pertinent information at critical junctures. Furthermore, the adoption of a communication architecture helps minimize information redundancy and overhead in both transmission and storage for machine level communication.