Historically, embedded system development lags behind workstation-based system development in adopting the latest technology innovations. Industrial automation system development, which heavily involves embedded development, lags further behind. The examples are C++, networked systems, component-based paradigm, etc. 

Historically also, this delay is getting shorter and shorter. Now when a new technology is introduced, we immediately see its generated enthusiasm in the automation industry. Wireless technology is such a latest revolution. 

This workshop seeks to participate in this early stage by bringing people from both automation industry and academia. Papers solicited could be position papers, opinions and surveys, application development reports, and original research results. The goal is for people to collaborate on locating, investigating, and solving challenges in applying wireless technology to industrial automation.  

We seek papers related to all aspects of the topic. Some of the interesting areas are: 

• Operating system & system software support – New OSes such as TinyOS are developed for small sensors. What is the impact on industrial automation? What is the impact on existing real-time OSes? What are the challenges with wireless network stacks? What kind of system software support is required?
• Fault tolerance & QoS - These are the issues faced by any wireless applications. Industrial automation requires higher level support due in part to the severity of failure consequences.
• Distributed systems & real-time scheduling - Industrial automation requires real-time control. How to schedule tasks across the interference-prone wireless network is one big challenge.
• Power consumption - In battery supported wireless device, power saving is very important. How big a problem is battery life in industrial automation? The current process control devices consume more energy to sense or actuate than to transmit wirelessly.
• Industry standards & interoperability - The existence of many different wireless standards poses a big challenge for adopting wireless for industrial automation. Do we need another standard for process or factory automation? How do we avoid repeating the problem of too many wireline fieldbus standards? In more general terms, how could we construct wireless automation systems with different components from different vendors?
• Sensor network & smart dust - low power sensor/mesh networks are new types of wireless applications. How they will impact the existing automation industry market is still not fully known. Will they replace existing control systems; will they tie into existing systems; or will they be deployed side by side with the existing systems?
• RFID & smart card - Radio Frequency Identification technology is taking off. Wal-Mart and the US government are demanding RFID tagged goods from the suppliers; Microsoft will RFID-enable the windows platform; new technology has enabled active RFID that is battery-free. RFID will be the key to factory automation.
• New applications - We also seek submissions about new automation applications that are only possible because of wireless technology. Examples are offshore control over Satellite, Hazardous environment exploration, etc.

The format of the workshop will be designed to foster discussion and interaction.