Dr. Tianyu Zhang of UIowa’s Department of Computer Science (CLAS), recently received a grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) for improving communication infrastructure that can be used in next generation manufacturing. He is joined in his research by Dr. Steve Goddard, professor of computer science and director of graduate programs at UIowa CS.
Meeting Changing Needs in the Manufacturing Sector
Dr. Zhang, the project leader, explains: “As manufacturing becomes more automated, intelligent, and interconnected, robots, sensors, machines, controllers, and computers increasingly need to exchange information and coordinate their actions in real time.”
Industrial networks have long been designed with reliability in mind. What is changing is the level and diversity of communication performance that emerging manufacturing applications demand. Some applications require extremely low, predictable communication delays so machines can coordinate their actions precisely. Others may generate much larger amounts of data or require communication, sensing, and computing resources to work together.
“Many of these applications must also meet timing and reliability requirements in environments where wireless conditions, interference, network load, and equipment availability can change over time,”says Zhang. “This creates an important challenge: future factories will need communication networks that can simultaneously support many different applications with very different requirements for timing, data rate, reliability, and computation. Meeting these requirements is one reason advanced technologies such as 5G/6G wireless communication and Time-Sensitive Networking (TSN) are becoming increasingly important for manufacturing.
Coordinating Multiple Technology and Communication Systems
Dr. Goddard says: “Our research asks how to integrate and manage these advanced communication technologies as a coordinated end-to-end system. Rather than optimizing the wireless and wired portions of the network independently, we are developing ways to jointly allocate, reserve, and schedule resources across both domains based on manufacturing application needs and network conditions. ”
“Our project adds another important dimension: these requirements must still be met as communication conditions change or disruptions occur. The system therefore uses information about current and anticipated conditions to make better resource-allocation and scheduling decisions. When possible, it can prepare for emerging problems before they affect critical communications. When unexpected faults do occur, it can adapt and use alternative strategies to keep supporting the applications with the most stringent requirements.
“In this way, prediction, adaptation, and fault recovery are not the end goals by themselves. They are tools that help the communication infrastructure satisfy the increasingly demanding requirements of next-generation manufacturing applications under real-world, changing conditions.”
Learn with Dr. Tianyu Zhang at UIowa
The Department of Computer Science at the University of Iowa is proud to have faculty working on leading edge strategies to improve manufacturing technology. Dr. Tianyu Zhang currently teaches a course in mobile computing at UIowa for computer science majors, where both graduates and undergraduates can gain the skills necessary to enter this growing field.