Dispersed Automation for Industrial Internet of Things
Gustavo Quirós, Diansong Cao, Arquimedes Canedo
Abstract
This position article presents 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. However, these devices are often underutilized due to the conservative allocation of resources, static task assignment, and lack of exploitation of parallelism. Dispersed automation gives new life to IIoT devices, some of them as powerful as general-purpose computers, and makes them accessible for the co-execution of various computational workloads, while dynamically adapting to different applications and operational environments. Two key contributions make this possible: the use of a domain-specific language and on-channel computation. We present dispersed automation as an enabling technology for the implementation of future smart and adaptive IIoT systems.