WP 3 Wireless in Industries      

  WP 3 Wireless in Industries
During the development and validation phase it has become obvious that further development and validation of wireless technologies in industries is essential to meet industrial requirements and to have maximum chances of industrial exploitation. This affects mainly to the increase of the localisation accuracy of the wireless localisation system, and to the investigation of effective measures to increase the robustness of wireless technologies, also concerning coexistence.

Original Objectives
  • Investigation of Office, Private and Public Wireless Network Solutions based on Use Cases/Scenarios.
  • Feasibility of the technologies (i.e. IEEE 802.11, IEEE 802.15, Ultra Wide Band Technology, Chip Technology, Location Awareness solutions in Public (GSM/UMTS) and Private Networks for industrial environment).
  • Investigation of Location Based Service technologies and solutions.
  • Specification of wireless for industrial environments covering the specific needs of the different industrial domains.
  • Prototype implementations to proof the concepts and enable the development of components, devices and systems.

Example of bluetooth devices in a VAN domain


Achievements and Results

Work Package 3 has dealt with wireless communication technologies for VAN project. Due to the specific industrial environmental and dynamic requirements for automation, the standard office implementation of wireless communication cannot cover all scenarios since they are optimised for office communication technologies only. Therefore, an investigation, identification, and implementation of feasible technologies and standards to provide a base for wireless technologies for industrial environment have been performed.

The first task in WP3 focused on a survey of existing wireless technologies and industry specific requirements. It described the fundamentals of wireless industrial communication from a VAN point of view.

In the context of Task 3.2 suitable wireless technologies for VAN have been defined. The goal was to cover all requirements of the different applications with only a few wireless technologies. One important finding was that most requirements could be covered mainly by four different wireless technologies. A concept on how to integrate wireless into the VAN ASE landscape has also been defined as part of Task 3.2.

As part of Task 3.3, a localisation approach based on wireless technologies has been introduced.

Details on the learning approach and its suitability for industry environments have been worked out.

This approach was also part of the implementation work done in Task 3.4. Furthermore, wireless devices have been enhanced by additional IEC 61158 functionality, which is the basis for VAN enabled devices.

Exhaustive coexistence measurements have been performed in Task 3.5. All possible combinations of the proposed wireless technologies have been investigated. Simple rules for coexistence of different wireless technologies were derived from the measurement results.


Work package 3 Wireless in industries
Task 3.1 Status and analysis
Task 3.2 Specification of wireless communications for automation
Task 3.3 Specification of location awareness for automation
Task 3.4 Prototype implementations
Task 3.5 Validation of Prototype Implementations


Delivery date Deliverable
Feb, 2006 Status and Analysis
Feb, 2007 Specification for wireless in industrial environment and industrial embedded devices
Jun, 2007 Test Specification; Design Specification
Jul, 2007 Specification of Awareness for Automation
Apr, 2008 Wireless Prototype System
Jun, 2008 Test specification, test cases and results
Apr, 2009 Measures to improve Robustness of Wireless Technologies
Jun, 2009 Wireless Prototyping - Extended Wireless Localisation System