Guest Editorial Special Section on Communication in Automation

International audienceThis Special Section on “Communication in Automation” presents seven papers that deal with relevant aspects pertaining to the topics highlighted above. Quite obviously, they cannot provide a comprehensive overview on the whole subject (nor they are intended to). Nevertheless, they are able to give some useful insight about the most recent advances in this field. The papers included in this Special Section cover a quite wide spectrum of topics, ranging from wired industrial communication systems aimed at providing strict real-time behavior, to hybrid systems obtained by adding wireless extensions to the wired backbone, to completely wireless industrial solutions able to ensure high determinism. Novel approaches have been described as well, aimed at improving either routing in WSNs or CSMA schemes so as to make them more suitable for the use in industrial automation systems. Finally, a testing approach for safety-critical automotive networks has been introduced and formally validated, and an agent platform defined and implemented that requires less resources, while granting higher performances and a methodology proposed and verified for assessing the performance of WSNs under cross-channel interference