Control-computing-communication co-design for autonomous industry (3C4AI)

Purpose and goal

Driven by the green and digital transitions, manufacturing and process industries are demanding new generation industrial automation solutions. This may include low-level control over 5G/6G wireless and/or cloud computing infrastructure, attractive thanks to their superior flexibility and computation power. Major technical challenges need to be solved in terms of determinism, security, and safety to fulfill this demand.

Expected effects and result

We will explore the safety and security verification by digital twin, safe model predictive control and reinforcement learning in device-edge-cloud continuum, reconfigurable and adaptive industrial control and process optimization, and proactive and cooperative orchestration of infrastructure resources. We expect to contribute to the sustainability of Swedish manufacturing and process industry by elevating the automation and optimization level and strengthen leadership position of Sweden.

Planned approach and implementation

A complete innovation value-chain in Sweden, spanning from academia to infrastructure vendor, automation system integrator, and end user, will work closely to develop new technologies to solve these challenges. The exploration will be driven and validated by two use cases, one targeting a real-life mining scenario and the other using mobile robots in discrete manufacturing, but the results may be generalized for all manufacturing and process industries.