From April 27 to 29, the largest IEEE conference in the field of industrial communication, the WFCS "Workshop on Factory Communication System", took place as a virtual event with live streams from Italy and Germany. The content focused on the topic of communication for industrial automation systems.
The Institute Industrial IT (inIT) at the TH OWL was one of the organizers of the renowned conference together with the University of Pavia from Italy and was involved in the organization with the following colleagues: Dr. Lukasz Wisniewski (General Co-Chair), Professor Henning Trsek (WiP Co-Chair) and Benedikt Lücke (Publicity Co-Chair).
During the three conference days, a total of 36 papers were presented, presenting the latest trends and innovative research approaches from industrial communication. The inIT was strongly represented with four publications. Maxim Friesen et al. wrote about the use of AI methods to perform network management more efficiently and optimally without manual access. Arne Neumann et al. reported on short-term and long-term resource planning in 5G campus networks. Marco Ehrlich et al. analyzed the topic of "Security Risk Assessment" in industrial facilities in his paper to be able to evaluate the potential of automatic execution. In addition, Lisa Gebauer et al. presented another paper from the security area, which was about the performance investigation when using Diffie-Hellman key exchange protocols on an embedded system.
The team of scientists from Austria, Lukas Vogl et al. from TU Vienna and University of Continuing Education Krems, received the Best Work in Progress Paper Award for their paper titled "Work in Progress: Side-Channel Watermarking for LoRaWAN Using Robust Inter-Packet Timing: An Experimental Approach". In addition, the Best Paper Award went to the US-India team of Intel Labs scientists, Mark Eisen et al. for their paper "Communication-Control Co-design in Wireless Edge Industrial Systems."
"Although all our hopes this year were for a face-to-face event, we are pleased with the renewed execution as an online conference. We had a total of over 120 registered, international participants from a wide range of scientific and business backgrounds. The presentations by industry representatives were also very well received. In three keynotes and an industry forum, they reported on topics such as the increasing complexity of industrial network systems, network convergence or requirements for the communication systems of the future," says a pleased Dr. Wisniewski.
One of the highlights of the event was a virtual live tour of the SmartFactoryOWL. With various impulse presentations, viewers were guided through the factory of the future and its demonstrators. This is available on the inIT YouTube channel: www.youtube.com/watch
The decision on the venue for next year's WFCS will be made in May. High on the agenda is once again the university location of Pavia. To stay up to date, feel free to follow the conference's LinkedIn channel: www.linkedin.com/company/wfcs-conference