-
-
Comment:
X.509 Certificate for the client certification and TLS handshakes between the Z-Fact0r components and the iLike machines
-
Comment:
The secure connection are encrypted by two types of authentication:
- With username and password
- With X.509 Certificate, the client presents his certificate to the broker during the TLS handshake.
-
Comment:
Difficulties in having access to machines/systems in the shopfloor for end users’ internal security policies was mitigated with the shopfloor machines/systems interface that is carried out by implementing security measures where different options to avoid direct access to machines through the company network have been investigated (e.g. separate network, mirror DB,…)
-
Comment:
Implementation of security mechanism on the Z-Fact0r platform components, to achieve security. The basic architecture provides authorization and authentication as a means of deploying a secure system architecture.
-
Comment:
SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) is a cryptographic protocol to provide communications security and ensure privacy and data integrity between two or more communicating computer applications.
OpenSSL is an open-source software library that contains an implementation of the SSL protocol used by NGINX (web server) to provide API over HTTPS.
-
Comment:
Data communication between components is essential for the project. End users create data on their shop floor with embedded sensors on the machines, new integrated sensors developed for the project. All these data is propagated in the system with data communication protocols, such as HTTP and AMQP, creating a data stream process in the system. Interoperability between the data communication protocolos and brockers is crucial for a successful result of the data communication of the system. Various data sources work together and use different communication protocols. As a result, all these components and protocols should seamlessly work and their interoperability is what helps them. A message brocker was developed for the project, based on AMQP for data communication. In the initial phases of the project, there were also RESTful APIs that helped in the initial development of the components.
-
Comment:
Z-Fact0r hybrid framework, obtained by applying a software and hardware integration strategy, is installed on the industrial end users shop floors. This architecture exploits features from Relational Databases and Triplestore while using the blackboard architectural pattern which ensures efficient and accurate communication of data transfer among software applications and devices.
-
Comment:
There is little integration with legacy systems, such as CMMS or ERP for the Z-Fact0r solution.
-
Comment:
The RESTful API over HTTP has been chosen to fulfil the necessity of sending intermediate or final results to the repository from Z-Modules side, the API utilizes JSON as default exchange format and JWT (JSON Web Token) as authentication mechanisms.
The JWT is a standard that defines a JSON format scheme for exchanging information between various services. JWTs are widely used to authenticate requests in Web Services authentication mechanisms where the client sends an authentication request to the server, the server generates a signed token and returns it to the client which, from that moment on, will use it to authenticate subsequent requests.
-
Comment:
To store data from different sources, including the data elaborated by various Z-Modules a Z-Fact0r data repository has been developed.
The first source of data is the temporal machine data coming from machine sensors, to store this data is used Cassandra, a distributed NoSQL DBMS capable to handle large amount of data across many servers and provide high availability.
The following one is used to store others complex and structured production information with the relational DBMS Mysql.
Another data source in the Z-Fact0r context is the output generated by various modules that carry out the analysis result.
-
Comment:
All database schema, communication protocols, security applications of the Z-Fact0r solution are designed to accommodate the scalability of the solution. All technology can be implemented in larger scale projects without major changes. The one difference with dealing with big data is the use of a different database approach, such as MongoDB, which is more suitable for big data analysis.
Difficulties in setting up the initial data collection infrastructure on the pilot sites was mitigated through the very careful data collection infrastructure selection where end users have been constantly assisted to set up the best approach to transfer data to Z-Fact0r platform, taking into consideration the internal security policies of the companies.