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The manufacturing sector represents a notable use case of the Industry 4.0 revolution, heavily stressing the capability of plants to ensure the desired QoS. Currently, manufacturing plants are characterized by an increasing amount of non-mission-critical traffic, in addition to traditional mission-critical safety-related traffic, which is negligible in comparison. Since computing and networking capabilities are no longer as abundant as in the past, there is the need to properly manage available resources. To ensure challenging QoS requirements, we propose a novel protocol suite specifically designed for our QoS-enabled semantic routing framework. Such a framework adopts an architecture that fits the characteristics of modern manufacturing environments and exploits an overlay networking solution providing a semantic routing substrate that operates both at the application and network layers.

The graphene-Ni(111) (GrNi) growth via chemical vapor deposition has been explored by resonant, angle-resolved, and dichroic photoemission spectroscopy (soft x-ray Res-ARPES) in order to identify the possible contributions to the electronic structure deriving from different phases that can coexist in this complex system. We provide evidences of electronic states so far unexplored at the (Gamma) over bar point of GrNi, appearing at the C K-edge resonance. These states show both circular dichroism (CD) and k dependence, suggesting a long-range orbital ordering, as well as a coherent matching with the underlying lattice. Through a comparison of core-level photoemission, valence band resonances, and constant initial-state spectroscopy, we demonstrate that these states are actually induced by a low residual component of nickel carbide (Ni2C). These results also show that caution must be exercised while interpreting x-ray magnetic circular dichroism collected on C K-edge with Auger partial yield method, due to the presence of CD in photoelectron spectra unrelated to magnetic effects.

Under near-ambient pressure conditions, carbon monoxide molecules intercalate underneath an epitaxial graphene monolayer grown on Ni(111), getting trapped into the confined region at the interface. On the basis of ab-initio density functional theory calculations, we provide here a full investigation of the intercalated CO pattern, highlighting the modifications induced on the graphene electronic structure. For a CO coverage as low as 0.14 monolayer (ML), the graphene layer is spatially decoupled from the metallic substrate, with a significant C 1s core level shift towards lower binding energies. The most relevant signature of the CO intercalation is a clear switching of the graphene doping state, which changes from n-type, when strongly interacting with the metal surface, to p-type. The shift of the Dirac cone linearly depends on the CO coverage, reaching about 0.9 eV for the saturation value of 0.57 ML. Theoretical predictions are compared with the results of scanning tunnelling microscopy, low-energy electron diffraction and photoemission spectroscopy experiments, which confirm the proposed scenario for the nearly saturated intercalated CO system. This result opens the way to the application of the graphene/Ni(111) interface as gas sensor to easily detect and quantify the presence of carbon monoxide.

We are still in the midst of Industry 4.0 (I4.0), with more manufacturing lines being labeled as smart thanks to the integration of advanced ICT in Cyber–Physical Systems (CPS). While I4.0 aims to provision cognitive CPS systems, the nascent Industry 5.0 (I5.0) era goes a step beyond, aiming to build cross-border, sustainable, and circular value chains benefiting society as a whole. An enabler of this vision is the integration of data and AI in the industrial decision-making process, which does not exhibit yet a coordination between the Operation and Information Technology domains (OT/IT). This work proposes an architectural approach and an accompanying software prototype addressing the OT/IT convergence problem. The approach is based on a two-layered middleware solution, where each layer aims to better serve the specific differentiated requirements of the OT and IT layers. The proposal is validated in a real testbed, employing actual machine data, showing the capacity of the components to gracefully scale and serve increasing data volumes.

Industry 4.0 aims to revolutionize and digitize the manufacturing sector by enabling and facilitating interoperability, solution agility, flexible (re)configuration of production chain(s) while, at the same time, reducing costs by exploiting real time data. These capabilities require to link the plant floor with data flows from/to the enterprise borders and include as core enabling technologies the Internet of Things (IoT), cloud, and edge computing key to move and execute parts of the business logic. The new capabilities might be leveraged in an innovative way, especially in the plant floor to dynamically change the monitoring/control logic of the smart machinery. In our reference scenario, the data flows originating from the plant floor can be processed and filtered locally, creating the basis for a selective Quality of Service (QoS) mechanism allowing for the implementation of reactive services, such as predictive maintenance. To that end, we propose an innovative serverless edge processing solution used for monitoring geo-distributed industrial plants. The proposal is validated in realistic settings, under different operational regimes, exhibiting acceptable performance trends under realistic periodic and variable traffic scenarios.

Industry 4.0 environments pose unique challenges for the realization of the communication substrate at the shop floor, due to the strict Quality of Service (QoS) requirements, the high heterogeneity of the employed data exchange protocols, and the different network technologies and addressing schema toward the machines. To address those issues, the paper proposes a distributed support based on a Message Oriented Middleware (MOM) and a Software Defined Network (SDN) control plane that coordinate to enable semantic routing by also allowing traffic differentiation as well as in-network processing at intermediate network nodes. Seminal results, collected in realistic industrial settings, confirm the feasibility of our proposal.

Time resolution is one of the most severe limitations of scanning probe microscopies (SPMs), since the typical image acquisition times are in the order of several seconds or even few minutes. As a consequence, the characterization of dynamical processes occurring at surfaces (e.g. surface diffusion, film growth, self-assembly and chemical reactions) cannot be thoroughly addressed by conventional SPMs. To overcome this limitation, several years ago we developed a first prototype of the FAST module, an add-on instrument capable of driving a commercial scanning tunneling microscope (STM) at and beyond video rate frequencies. Here we report on a fully redesigned version of the FAST module, featuring improved performance and user experience, which can be used both with STMs and atomic force microscopes (AFMs), and offers additional capabilities such as an atom tracking mode. All the new features of the FAST module, including portability between different commercial instruments, are described in detail and practically demonstrated., The FAST project has received funding from the EU-H2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement no. 654360 NFFA-Europe. The ICN2 is funded by the CERCA program/ Generalitat de Catalunya. The ICN2 is supported by the Severo Ochoa program of MINECO (Grant SEV-2017-0706). We acknowledge S. Gottlieb, M. Fernández-Regúlez and F. Pérez-Murano for providing us with the silicon and block copolymer samples. Work at TUM was supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (Research grants ES 349/1-2 and HE 3454/18-2). BAJL acknowledges a Research Fellowship from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowship under grant ClusterDynamics (no. 703972) from the EU Horizon 2020 Programme.

Stable organic radicals have potential applications for building organic spintronic devices. To fulfill this potential, the interface between organic radicals and metal electrodes must be well characterized. Here, through a combined effort that includes synthesis, scanning tunneling microscopy, X-ray spectroscopy, and single-molecule conductance measurements, we comprehensively probe the electronic interaction between gold metal electrodes and a benchtop stable radical - the Blatter radical. We find that despite its open-shell character and having a half-filled orbital close to the Fermi level, the radical is stable on a gold substrate under ultrahigh vacuum. We observe a Kondo resonance arising from the radical and spectroscopic signatures of its half-filled orbitals. By contrast, in solution-based single-molecule conductance measurements, the radical character is lost through oxidation with charge transfer occurring from the molecule to metal. Our experiments show that the stability of radical states can be very sensitive to the environment around the molecule.

We study the structural, electronic, and spectroscopic properties of pentacene adsorbed on Al(001) surface, combining density functional theory (DFT) methods including van der Waals interactions with X-ray photoemission (XPS), near-edge X-ray absorption fine structure (NEXAFS), and scanning tunneling microscopy (STM). We find a major change of the molecular backbone resulting in a peculiar V- shape bending, due to the direct anchoring of the two central carbons atop two Al atoms underneath. In the most stable adsorption configuration, pentacene is oriented with the long axis parallel to the substrate [110] direction, where such anchoring is favored by optimally matched interatomic distances. Remarkably, due to the generally low degree of order, we measure by STM a significant portion of molecules oriented along the [100] direction, which also display the same V-shape conformation, as driven by the bond of the central carbon atoms of pentacene to a pair of slightly displaced Al atoms. ■

In this paper we present the results of a search for nuclearites in the penetrating cosmic radiation using the scintillator and track-etch subdetectors of the MACRO apparatus. The analyses cover the beta = v/c range at the detector depth (3700 hg/cm(2)) 10(-5) < beta < 1; for beta = 2 x 10(-3) the flux limit is 2.7 x 10(-16) cm(-2)s(-1)sr(-1) for an isotropic flux of nuclearites, and twice this value for a flux of downgoing nuclearites.