Fog Computing in Industry 4.0: Applications and Challenges—A Research Roadmap

Expeditious technical developments have remodeled the industrial sector. These developments vary from mechanization of industrial tasks to autonomous industrial processes in which no human intervention is needed for regular working. An advanced concept i.e. Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) evolved with the appliance of Internet of Things (IoT) in industrial processes; gave a new dimension to the technological advancements in the industrial sector by facilitating industrial processes with the support of Internet. Impeding the interpretation of IIoT to the production process supported another sub-domain of IoT, recognized as Industry 4.0. The concept of Industry 4.0 is realized using sensor networks, automated business processes, robots, smart equipment and machines, actuators, and people. Consequently, a huge volume of disparate data is initialized for analysis and processing. In industry, most of the processes are real-time. To avoid communication delays and ensure data security, the majority of the processes are completed locally and only necessary data is transferred over the Internet for cloud storage. To fulfill this objective, there is always a high requirement of a middleware amidst industrial processes/tools and cloud. In this connection, Fog is the most workable solution for distinct industrial scenarios. In the manufacturing industry, it can facilitate local processing along with tolerable communication delay to robots and actuators. Data gathered from various industrial processes is usually disorganized which needs pre-processing for refinement using Fog locally then communicated to the cloud. So, fog computing plays a vital role in various Industry 4.0 applications by resolving various issues. But the deployment of Fog computing in Industry 4.0 also faces a lot many challenges of different kinds related to programmability, security, heterogeneity, and interoperability. In this book chapter, we present an overview of Fog computing along with the architectural framework of Industry 4.0. We discussed the various applications of Fog computing in industry 4.0 in detail. Different problems faced in the implementation of fog computing in Industry 4.0 will be discussed. We have also introduced various research challenges to be dealt with for the efficient deployment of fog in Industry 4.0.