Dispersed Automation for Industrial Internet of Things - An Enabler for Advanced Manufacturing

This position paper introduces the vision of Dispersed Automation, a novel approach for reprogramming the omnipresent Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) devices in critical infrastructure for the co-execution of general-purpose computation workloads in an optimal and reliable manner. The key observation is that IIoT devices are available in large quantities in critical infrastructure (e.g., micro-grids, water management and treatment, energy generation and transmission, manufacturing, buildings, and traffic) but are often underutilized due to the conservative allocation of resources, static task assignment, and lack of exploitation of parallelism that is intrinsic in redundant hardware. Dispersed Automation can give new life to IIoT devices, some of them as powerful as general-purpose computers, and can make them accessible for the co-execution of various computational workloads while dynamically adapting to different applications and operational environments. Two key technical innovations will make this possible: the use of a domain-specific language, and on-channel computation. This paper shows how Dispersed Automation can be an enabling technology for the implementation of smart manufacturing systems.