A Resilient Fire Protection System for Software-Defined Factories

A Smart Factory exploits information and communication technologies (ICT) to improve the production process and the working environment, usually addressing safety concerns. To this concern, factory-grade fire protection systems are governed by several procedures and standards whose application often becomes definitely challenging when the factory premises are dispersed across multiple administrative domains. In such contexts, the Smart Factory approach can prove very effective in the management and coordination of the factory-level fire protection system. However, a catastrophic event may compromise the ICT infrastructure, affecting communication among factory domains and therefore its smart services. A strategy to cope with the latter may be the introduction of mechanisms to handle data analysis on-site for a prompt response while enabling seamless data distribution and processing among neighboring (federated) ICT infrastructures and emergency operators. In this work, a novel software-defined approach for the adaptive management of a Smart Factory infrastructure is proposed, centered around business logic rewiring and reconfiguration at runtime across different factory domains. Thereby, even in the case of catastrophic (e.g., potentially disruptive) events, working devices of the emergency system can go on with their operations, including transferring data to rescuers and others emergency control systems. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed software-defined factory approach, a federated fire protection system operating in an industrial setting is implemented as a case study, able to promptly react and adapt to infrastructure-critical fires and their consequences by leveraging all information and computing facilities pooled over cloud/fog/edge devices spanning the premises.