Artículo de revista
Software components for smart industry based on microservices: a case study in pH control Process for the beverage industry
Fecha
2021-03Registro en:
20799292
Universidad Autónoma de Occidente
Repositorio Educativo Digital
Autor
Serrano Magaña, Héctor
González, Apolinar
Ibarra-Junquera, Vrani
Balbastre, Patricia
Martínez Castro, Diego
Simó, José
Institución
Resumen
Modern industries require constant adaptation to new trends. Thus, they seek greater
flexibility and agility to cope with disruptions, as well as to solve needs or meet the demand for
growth. Therefore, smart industrial applications require a lot of flexibility to be able to react more
quickly to continuous market changes, offer more personalized products, increase operational efficiency, and achieve optimum operating points that integrate the entire value chain of a process. This
requires the capture of new data that are subsequently processed at different levels of the hierarchy of
automation processes, with requirements and technologies according to each level. The result is a new
challenge related to the addition of new functionalities in the processes and the interoperability
between them. This paper proposes a distributed computational component-based framework that
integrates communication, computation, and storage resources and real-time capabilities through
container technology, microservices, and the publish/subscribe paradigm, as well as contributing
to the development and implementation of industrial automation applications by bridging the gap
between generic architectures and physical realizations. The main idea is to enable plug-and-play
software components, from predefined components with their interrelationships, to achieve industrial applications without losing or degrading the robustness from previous developments. This
paper presents the process of design and implementation with the proposed framework through
the implementation of a complex pH control process, ranging from the simulation part to its scaling
and implementation to an industrial level, showing the plug-and-play assembly from a definition of
components with their relationships to the implementation process with the respective technologies
involved. The effectiveness of the proposed framework was experimentally verified in a real production process, showing that the results scaled to an industrial scale comply with the simulated
design process. A qualitative comparison with traditional industrial implementations, based on
the implementation requirements, was carried out. The implementation was developed in the beverage production plant “Punta Delicia”, located in Colima, Mexico. Finally, the results showed that
the platform provided a high-fidelity design, analysis, and testing environment for cyber information
flow and their effect on the physical operation of the pH control