Smart Manufacturing Through Cloud-Based Smart Objects and SWE

Smart manufacturing is a key aspect for innovation and competitiveness, and involves several dimensions of the production chain to be analysed, assessed and enhanced within a factory. To target this issue, concepts and ideas behind the IoT (Internet of Things) are applied, so that connected smart entities cooperate in order to achieve broader goals or increase the overall knowledge in the factory through information sharing. Smart entities in the IoT are typically referred as WSNs (Wireless Sensor Networks) that capture physical (real) data and events and produce virtual (digital) information to be processed. Unfortunately, current WSNs have limited interoperability and processing capabilities, reducing the integration degree with existing applications. This chapter proposes a solution for both previous technical challenges within a factory. Interoperability is achieved by means of SWE (Sensor Web Enablement) whereas processing capabilities are provided through virtualizing smart objects in a datacentre, placed commonly in the factory but it could also be located elsewhere, applying cloud-based techniques. The architecture and deployment has been arranged for the specific use case of a manufacturing company and a risk prevention scenario. Experimentation results show that smart objects could be provided at runtime with fine granularity level depending on the tasks to be performed. Moreover, smart objects are able to co-operate forming meta-objects to satisfy global tasks or minimize certain risks. Finally, smart objects are able to encapsulate private (health and/or personal) data that should not be shared with other objects or processes.