Integrating the IEEE 1451 and IEC 61499 Standards with the Industrial Internet Reference Architecture

Industrial Internet of Things focuses on the manufacturing process and connects with other associated concepts such as Industry 4.0, Cyber-Physical Systems, and Cyber-Physical Production Systems. Because of the complexity of those components, it is necessary to define reference architectures models to manage Industry 4.0 and the Industrial Internet of Things. The reference architecture models aim to solve the interoperability problem enabling the syntactical and semantic levels of interoperability. A reference architecture model provides a bottom/top view of an industrial process, from the physical transducers at the physical layer to the business layer. The physical layer provides access to a twin representation of a physical thing in the digital world, extending the functionalities in the manufacturing process. This paper studies the syntactic interoperability between the IEEE 1451 and IEC 61499 in an industrial environment. The IEEE 1451 family of standards has the essential characteristics to support the information exchange between smart transducers (sensors and actuators), building the digital elements and meeting the Industry 4.0 requirements. The IEC 61499 standard enables industrial control and automation. These two standards combined at the syntactic level solve an interoperability problem. The IEC 61499 also provides data to the framework layer, supplying all the parameters defined for the communication layer specified by a reference architecture model. This paper combines the IEEE 1451 with the IEC 61499, enabling data exchange in a reference architecture model proposed for Industry 4.0. Network performance at the communication level of a reference architecture model in a local network and an external network is evaluated for the proposed application. The IEEE 1451 standard implementation and adoption to acquire data and communicate it inside an industrial process allowed the IEC 61499 standard to control an industrial process. The IEEE 1451 standard is implemented in a MSP430 low power microcontroller. A Raspberry Pi running FORTE and 4diac in the USA and Portugal were used to test a local network in Portugal and an external network in USA. Data related to network performance was obtained with Wireshark and processed with MATLAB. Tests using the Message Queuing Transport Telemetry Transport and Hypertext Transport Protocols verified the performance of these protocols, supported by the IEEE 1451 and IEC 61499 standards, showing that communication inside an Industry 4.0 environment is possible. MQTT protocol is faster, has a small packet size, and consumes less bandwidth. The HTTP protocol uses more bandwidth but is more reliable for real-time communication, essential for Industry 4.0.