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Revision of a Smart Factory Software Architecture from Monolith to Microservices

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Enterprise Design, Operations, and Computing. EDOC 2024 Workshops (EDOC 2024)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing ((LNBIP,volume 537))

  • 18 Accesses

Abstract

Software architecture plays an important role in the development of modern, complex software systems as it influences a system’s quality attributes and ability to grow with future demand. Designing the software architecture of cyber-physical systems (CPS) becomes even more challenging due to their capability of directly influencing the physical world and thus introducing new non-functional requirements related to fault-tolerance, safety, and resource scarcity. Existing research focuses on systems engineering to achieve the vertical integration of CPS with an organization’s information systems and processes, but not on software architecture to horizontally extend existing systems with new CPS. In this report we describe the process of revising an existing monolithic software architecture for a smart factory towards a microservices-based architecture to meet these new requirements and prepare the factory to be extended with new CPS. For the revision of the existing architecture, we provide an analysis of its code base before and after changes, a description of the refactoring process, and discuss relevant new non-functional requirements and architecture options. We elaborate on the architectural decisions favoring microservices and analyze the new architecture regarding improved quality attributes to evaluate the system.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    https://github.com/ics-unisg/smart-factory-monolith.

  2. 2.

    https://www.hello2morrow.com/products/sonargraph/architect9.

  3. 3.

    https://github.com/ics-unisg/smart-factory-microservices.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Computer Science, University of St. Gallen, 9000, St. Gallen, Switzerland

    Ronny Seiger

  2. Artificial Intelligence and Intelligent Information Systems, University of Trier, 54296, Trier, Germany

    Lukas Malburg

  3. German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI), Branch University of Trier, Behringstraße 21, 54296, Trier, Germany

    Lukas Malburg

Authors
  1. Ronny Seiger
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  2. Lukas Malburg
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Ronny Seiger .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Duisburg-Essen, Essen, Germany

    Monika Kaczmarek-Heß

  2. Niederrhein University of Applied Sciences, Mönchengladbach, Germany

    Kristina Rosenthal

  3. Czech Technical University in Prague, Prague, Czech Republic

    Marek Suchánek

  4. Universidade de Lisboa, Lisbon, Portugal

    Miguel Mira Da Silva

  5. TU Wien, Vienna, Austria

    Henderik A. Proper

  6. TU Wien, Vienna, Austria

    Marianne Schnellmann

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Seiger, R., Malburg, L. (2025). Revision of a Smart Factory Software Architecture from Monolith to Microservices. In: Kaczmarek-Heß, M., Rosenthal, K., Suchánek, M., Da Silva, M.M., Proper, H.A., Schnellmann, M. (eds) Enterprise Design, Operations, and Computing. EDOC 2024 Workshops . EDOC 2024. Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing, vol 537. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-79059-1_13

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-79059-1_13

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