Integration of Cutting-Edge Interoperability Approaches in Cyber-Physical Production Systems and Industry 4.0

Background

The fourth industrial revolution and the increasing research in information and communication technologies (ICT) results in a continuous evolution in the level of industrialization and technological development of factories. This new level of interaction and heterogeneity has brought the need of standardization and modelling of production systems as reference architectures. Those are used to describe high-level models and their internal relation.

Standard development organizations of countries such as USA, Germany and China have developed roadmaps and standardized solutions for smart manufacturing to integrate emerging ICT into the manufacturing domain. For instance, the Reference Architectural Model Industrie 4.0 (RAMI 4.0) provides a tridimensional description of the production life cycle, hierarchies and different layers of a smart production system. Similar characteristics are shared by the Smart manufacturing ecosystem (SME) developed by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST - USA) and by the Intelligent Manufacturing System Architecture (IMSA) developed by the Ministry of Industry and Information technology of China.

Certainly, those standardization efforts show the high level of commitment of governments and the high interest of industrial stakeholders for the integration of cyber-physical components creating a smart and highly interconnected environment. This level of integration goes from an inter-organizational (horizontal integration) to a local or intra-organizational point of view (vertical integration), being the latest essential for a seamless collaboration in an enterprise hierarchy (Alcácer & Cruz-Machado, 2019).