Resilient Communication Systems for Safe and Flexible Production Systems

Project Description

The fourth industrial revolution has made way for the global transformation from traditional manufacturing and industrial practices to large scale automation using modern smart technologies like artificial intelligence and advanced robotics. In order to allow the diverse machines to carry out their complex tasks, a robust communication infrastructure that enables communication between the participants, while also fulfilling their respective needs, is paramount. Although state-of-the-art solutions tend to provide the network resources required for the operation of a production environment, frequent unplanned downtime of system or reduced network resources through hardware failures or other disruptive events are crucial challenges that still remain to be solved. This opens up opportunities to design a resilient wireless communication infrastructure which fulfills the requirements of different industrial applications, especially time-critical industrial applications like Automated Guided Vehicle (AGV) or process automation.

Within the RePro project, two distinct variants of resilience will be researched:

1. Achieving intrinsic resilience through appropriate design of the communication network, by using multiple wireless interfaces and algorithms that dynamically adapt the network infrastructure to make sure that the application requirements like latency are met.
2. Achieving extrinsic resilience by allowing the clients in the network to adapt their current communication behavior according to the current network state when the network is experiencing disruptive events.

The proposed solution is realized in two different use cases:

1. Future-oriented circular production process in flexible and modular production environment
2. Autonomous driving vehicle and automated guided vehicles in a production setup

This project is a cooperation between four institutes of TU Braunschweig and three industry partners.

Project partners

• Institut für Betriebssysteme und Rechnerverbund (IBR)
• Institut für Nachrichtentechnik (IfN)
• Institut für Fahrzeugtechnik (IfF)
• Institut für Institut für Werkzeugmaschinen und Fertigungstechnik (IWF)
• Sentics GmbH
• Volkswagen AG
• TÜV Süd

Funding: Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung (BMBF)

Start: 2023

Project members at IBR

Student Assistents

Theses

if you are interested in writing a thesis regarding this project, please feel free to contact Torben Petersen, or Shashank Jhansale.

Publications

• Shashank Anil Kumar Jhansale, Ramprasad Raghunath, Eduard Jorswieck and Lars Wolf: Towards A Holistic Framework for Access Point Placement of Resilient Networks, in The 1st Workshop on Resilient Networks and Systems, Ilmenau, Germany, 2025 (jhansale2025ReNeSys, BibTeX)
• Zexu Zhang, Anna-Sophia Wilde, Max Juraschek, Yasin Bulut, Mojan Wegener, Torben Petersen, Shashank Anil Kumar Jhansale, Lara Jüschke, Christoph Hermann, Eduard Jorswieck and Lars) Wolf: Supporting the resilience of communication systems in manufacturing by providing extrinsic resilience from production system entities, in WGP-Kongress, Lecture Notes in Production Engineering, pages 663-670, Springer, Cham, 2025 (repro-extrinsic-resilience, DOI, BibTeX)