itsowl-IV: Clusterquerschnittsprojekt Intelligente Vernetzung

In future, Intelligent Technical Systems will be increasingly found in highly diverse applications and processes (smart factory, smart grid, automobile, building automation, etc.), where they are supposed to network with each other independently, to communicate autonomously and to determine their condition reliably. Ideally, the entire integration should be self-configurating as plug-and-play process without any user interaction in order to avoid time-consuming and error-prone manual configuration of the systems. Besides self-configuration, self-diagnosis and quality monitoring of complex, networked systems based on sensor and information fusion gain more and more importance. Hence, the systems are enabled to determine their own condition and to react in an adaptive manner resulting in a system being more fault-tolerant and flexible. Besides the ability to be integrated in an existing system due to its mechanical construction, an Intelligent Technical System must provide new methods for self-configuration at the three levels connectivity, middleware and application and it must incorporate self-diagnosis mechanisms. These capabilities directly lead to a reduction of efforts and faults as well as to decreased costs due to reduced failures times of the system.

Hence, the overall objective of clusterproject 3 – “Intelligent Networking” (itsowl-IV) is to develop the required methods and system architecture for the realisation of self-configuration and self-diagnosis of an Intelligent Technical System. The most important requirements are interoperability, reliability, self-configuration and integration ability in resource-limited devices. Detailed requirements are defined and analysed in the course of the project based on all relevant innovation projects. The project itsowl-IV is supposed to specify a set of instruments considering communication protocols for networking, mechanisms for self-configuration at the three levels application (semantics), middleware and connectivity as well as procedures for sensor and information fusion required by the core companies for their innovation projects. The specifications will be implemented as prototypes (hard- and software components) within the framework of an evaluation platform which can be used by the cluster partners for their own projects.