Nowadays, the harsh industrial environment remains one of the vital challenges for an effective deployment of wireless technologies in factories to promote the industrial upgrade. In this study, a complete solution is proposed for robust radio communications in indoor factories. Herein, measurement setups are integrated with industrial mobile facilities, e.g. an automated guided vehicle and a mobile robot. Calibration is advised for accurately revealing an industrial radio environment. A hybrid sequential design strategy is used to enhance the efficiency of the measurement campaign. This further leads to a surrogate modelling based radio environment map, which facilitates a holistic view and evaluation of the radio quality of service over the target shop floor. In addition, an over-dimensioning heuristic is proposed to guarantee that every target location can be wirelessly covered by at least two access points (APs). Moreover, the smart switch mechanism dynamically powers on/off the over-dimensioned APs, so as to ensure full coverage even at the presence of physical disturbance. The investigation on two real factories and the coverage prediction tool WHIPP further demonstrates the solution's effectiveness. Eventually, a rich outlook is drawn for the roadmap towards an artificially intelligent system for robust industrial wireless communications.

Abstract-The use of wireless communication systems is important for next-generation industrial environments. To be able to set up a robust network that reacts to changes in the environment, a system for real-time updating path loss models is introduced, based on a continuous measurement of the signal strength in the network. The system is a necessary building block for the creation of a fully automated wireless network planner.