Evolving technology in wireless telecommunication, such as 5G, provides opportunities to utilize wireless communication more in an industrial setting where reliability and predictability are of great concern. More capable Industrial Internet of Things devices (IIoT) are, indeed, a catalyst for Industry 4.0. Still, before the IIoT devices can be deemed capable enough, a method to evaluate the IIoT systems unobtrusively—so that the evaluation does not affect the performance of the systems—must be established. This thesis aims to answer how the performance of a distributed control system can be unobtrusively evaluated, and also determine what the state-of-the-art is in latency measurements in distributed control systems. To answer the question, a novel diagnostics method for time-critical control systems in cloud-fog automation is proposed and extensively evaluated on real-life testbeds that use 5G, WiFi 6, and Ethernet in an edge-computing topology with real control systems. The feasibility of the proposed method was verified by experiments conducted with a diagnostics framework prototype developed in this thesis. In the proposed diagnostics framework, the controller application is monitored by a computing probe based on an extended Berkeley Packet Filter program. Network communication between the controller and control target is evaluated with a multi-channel Ethernet probe and custom-made software that computes several metrics related to the performance of the distributed system. The data from the unobtrusive probes are sent to a time-series database that is used for further analysis and real-time visualization in a graphical interface created with Grafana. The proposed diagnostics method together with the developed prototype can be used as a research infrastructure for future evaluations of distributed control systems.

This work deals mainly with electrical energy. In the first part is focused on alternative energy sources, and describes structure of consumption and production of electricity over the past few years, during which is focuses on renewable energy sources. In this context, assesses the conditions for alternative energy sources in the Czech Republic from the perspective of the legislative, as well as current status and potential of alternative energy sources and tries to predict the development of these issues. The next section describes the Smart Grids as a means to achieve these goals. There are presented the basic features of this system, its goals and challenges, a description of the integration of Smart Grids with other sources of electricity and the benefits of using Smart Grids both from the perspective of user and from the perspective of system. Other parts are focused on distributed control systems in the energy sector, its development and principle. The last part is devoted to consideration of the role of alternative energy sources and distributed generation in Smart Grids.