High level control of chemical plant by industry 4.0 solutions

The push towards Industry 4.0 is constraining the industries to work in integrated supply chains. This implies to be open to the integration their production plants with other plants, and to provide access to their data and processes. In most cases, this also means to give access at data and flows to their customers to perform some synchronizations, permit supervision, and to create integrated control rooms, with synoptics and dashboards. This activity is also facilitated by the introduction of IoT solutions with IoT Devices, IoT Brokers, etc., which have a completely different approach with respect to DCS and SCADA solutions usually adopted in the industry for controlling their local productions. In this paper, Snap4Industry with its IoT development environment and framework for implementing the Control and Supervision of complex plant with multiple DCS and/or chains in the view of Industry 4.0 is presented. In particular, the paper describes the motivations/requirements and the actions performed to extend IoT Snap4City 100% open-source platform to comply with Industry 4.0 requirements. The main additions for creating Snap4Industry solution have been on: (i) industry protocols, (ii) custom widgets and synoptics Dashboards, (iii) new MicroServices for Node-RED for enabling the usage of synoptics as event driven devices, (iv) usage of WebSocket secure for the communication with custom Synoptics and Widgets for dashboards, automatized process for producing synoptics templates according to GDPR, and (v) the possibility of creating integrated workflows from data ingestion to synoptics. The paper also presents the assessment of the solution in terms of volume data and messages exchanged. The research has been founded into SODA R&D project founded by Regional Tuscany Gov.