Development of a secure communication framework for smart factory monitoring

Thesis Type: 6 months Master Thesis (Laurea Magistrale) for Computer Science or Computer Engineering students.

Requirements:
• Good design and programming skills in Java. Some knowledge of OSGi is a preference.

Description:
Motivation:
Internet-of-Things (IoT) technologies are expected to become a key instrument to extract information from the physical world and integrate it with existing IT infrastructures. Particularly, in the smart industry scenario, also called Industry 4.0, the Internet-of-Things paradigm is going to introduce several innovations: cyber-physical systems monitor physical processes and the physical devices are “abstracted” in virtual entity, which can be more easily interconnected, despite their differences in terms of hardware and software. Indeed, one of the main innovation of the Internet of Things in the smart-factory scenario, is the possibility to enable real time communication machine-to-machine and machine-to-humans in a standard, secure, scalable and reliable way.

Assets:
• VIRTUS is an IoT-oriented middleware created and maintained by ISMB which provides a scalable, agile, event-driven, network independent tool to manage a large-scale network of heterogeneous cooperating objects leveraging on open and standard instruments
• Clayster Exchange is a solution based on open standards, which allows applying provisioning, delegation of trust and device discovery in Internet of Things devices and applications.

Objective:
The purpose of this thesis is to design and develop a framework able to perform continuous monitoring of plant-wide resources, based on VIRTUS and the Clayster provisioning server. The secure and reliable communication infrastructure will be ensured between all levels: from shopfloor to management level; in such a way that, for example, the communication-related malfunctions are properly detected and reported to control systems so that “failure awareness”, “graceful degradation” or “selfhealing” approaches can be employed. ISMB will be the external technical advisors, with support from Clayster (http://www.clayster.com/).

Contacts: send a resume with attached the list of exams taken during the Bachelor of Science to pert@ismb.it specifying the thesis code and title.