NAMUR Open Architecture (NOA) follows the concept of creating an Industry 4.0 world that stands beside the classical automation pyramid. In this concept, devices which previously only had a communication path within the OT world receive a controlled second communication path into the IT world, where NOA realizes monitoring and optimization applications. The challenge lies in retrofitting communication in brownfield plants, where a large fraction of field devices and many control devices currently only have analog and/or OT communication. In this paper we introduce 5G and the standards contain and show that these are a very promising path to retrofit communication from the OT to the IT world of NOA. This allows to retrofit NOA, but also forms the basis for future Industry 4.0 szenarios, in which the automation pyramid may be dropped.
No takes yet. Share an insight, caveat, or question.
Kleppmann et al. (2021) studied this question.