Integration of Manufacturing Information via Dynamic Information Model Aggregation

An important part of the industry 4.0 concept is the horizontal and vertical integration of manufacturing systems. Information exchange in traditional production environments happens through interfaces that are connections between strictly defined senders and receivers. This limits the possibility for changing and extending the manufacturing system. A possible approach to enable the information exchange between all system entities uniformly are information models. Such models are semantic descriptions of the available data. The creation of these models needs to follow the manufacturing process, but also requires certain standardization to improve efficiency. Another challenge is the actual technical integration of the information into a common address space. This paper connects an approach for information modeling with a concept for dynamic aggregation. The approach is described with the help of a continuous example that uses OPC UA as a middleware technology.

Optimization and Implementation of Efficient and Universal Quantum Key Distribution

Since quantum key distribution (QKD) can provide proven unconditional security guaranteed by the fundamental laws of quantum mechanics, it has attracted increasing attention over the past three decades. Its low bit rate, however, cannot meet the requirements of modern applications. To solve this problem, recently, an efficient and universal QKD protocol based on chaotic cryptography and middleware technology was proposed, which efficiently increases the bit rate of the underlying QKD system. Nevertheless, we find that this protocol does not take the bit errors into account, and one error bit may lead to the failure of the protocol. In this paper, we give an optimized protocol and deploy it on a BB84 QKD platform. The experimental results show that the optimized version provides resistance to bit errors compared with the original version. And the statistical properties of the generated bits are fully assessed using different methods. The evaluation results prove that the proposed protocol can generate bits with outstanding properties.

Efficient and universal quantum key distribution based on chaos and middleware

Quantum key distribution (QKD) promises unconditionally secure communications, however, the low bit rate of QKD cannot meet the requirements of high-speed applications. Despite the many solutions that have been proposed in recent years, they are neither efficient to generate the secret keys nor compatible with other QKD systems. This paper, based on chaotic cryptography and middleware technology, proposes an efficient and universal QKD protocol that can be directly deployed on top of any existing QKD system without modifying the underlying QKD protocol and optical platform. It initially takes the bit string generated by the QKD system as input, periodically updates the chaotic system, and efficiently outputs the bit sequences. Theoretical analysis and simulation results demonstrate that our protocol can efficiently increase the bit rate of the QKD system as well as securely generate bit sequences with perfect statistical properties. Compared with the existing methods, our protocol is more efficient and universal, it can be rapidly deployed on the QKD system to increase the bit rate when the QKD system becomes the bottleneck of its communication system.