Organized by Gianluca Cena, IEIIT-CNR, Italy (cena@polito.it); Luigi Alfredo Grieco, Politecnico di Bari (a.grieco@poliba.it).

Starting with the introduction of fieldbuses in the 1980s, digital serial communications have become increasingly popular in automated factory environments, including the shop-floor where they progressively replaced conventional analogue point-to-point wiring. With the advent of the new millennium, it became clear that the key for improving industrial communication systems further is the adoption of technologies derived from the ICT world. Besides increasing performance noticeably and enabling complete integration of all devices and applications in production plants, a reduction in design, deployment and maintenance costs could be achieved as well. Many challenging points are still open in this field, which concerns for example high-performance industrial Ethernet, the adoption of wireless communication technologies (both WLANs and WSNs) in manufacturing environments, the seamless integration of legacy fieldbus systems or similar solutions derived from automotive or building automation contexts, and so on.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

• Industrial Ethernet networks
• Industrial wireless networks
• Factory and process automation networks
• Fieldbuses and legacy industrial communication solutions
• Sensor/automotive/building automation networks
• Real-time and isochronous communication
• Networked embedded systems
• Safety, security and fault-tolerance in industrial communications
• Internetworking, integration and interoperability aspects