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Designing Strongly-decoupled Industry 4.0 Applications Across the Stack: A Use Case

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Digital Transformation

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Abstract

Loose coupling of system components on all levels of automated production systems enables vital systems-of-systems properties such as simplified composition, variability, testing, reuse, maintenance, and adaptation. All these are crucial aspects needed to realize highly flexible and adaptable production systems. Based on traditional software architecture concepts, we describe in this chapter a use case of how message-based communication and appropriate architectural styles can help to realize these properties. A building block is the capabilities that describe what production participants (machines, robots, humans, logistics) are able to do. Capabilities are applied at all levels in our use case: describing the production process, describing machines, transport logistics, down to capabilities of the various functional units within a machine or robot. Based on this use case, this chapter aims to show how such a system can be designed to achieve loosely coupling and what example technologies and methodologies can be applied on the different levels.

The research reported in this chapter has been funded in part by LIT-ARTI-2019-019, and the LIT Secure and Correct Systems Lab, and the FFG, Contract No. 881844: Pro\(^2\)Future is funded within the Austrian COMET Program Competence Centers for Excellent Technologies under the auspices of the Austrian Federal Ministry for Climate Action, Environment, Energy, Mobility, Innovation and Technology, the Austrian Federal Ministry for Digital and Economic Affairs and of the Provinces of Upper Austria and Styria. COMET is managed by the Austrian Research Promotion Agency FFG.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    OPC UA is short for Open Platform Communications Unified Architecture.

  2. 2.

    http://www.iec61499.de/.

  3. 3.

    The core meta-model uses the term Actor which we replace here with Participant to avoid confusing the term with the actor implementation approach outlined in Sect. 5.

  4. 4.

    An OPC UA node has a unique id, but potentially a non-unique browsename.

  5. 5.

    https://akka.io/.

  6. 6.

    https://actor-framework.org/.

  7. 7.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Actor_model#Actor_libraries_and_frameworks.

  8. 8.

    https://www.iso.org/standard/57308.html.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute for Software Systems Engineering, Johannes Kepler University, Linz, Austria

    Christoph Mayr-Dorn & Alexander Egyed

  2. LIT CPS Lab, Johannes Kepler University, Linz, Austria

    Alois Zoitl

  3. Flexible Production Systems, PROFACTOR GmbH, Steyr-Gleink, Austria

    Georg Weichhart

  4. Cognitive Robotics and Shopfloors, Pro2Future GmbH, Linz, Austria

    Michael Mayrhofer

Authors
  1. Christoph Mayr-Dorn
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  2. Alois Zoitl
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  3. Georg Weichhart
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  4. Michael Mayrhofer
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  5. Alexander Egyed
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Correspondence to Christoph Mayr-Dorn .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Technische Universität München, Garching b. München, Bayern, Germany

    Birgit Vogel-Heuser

  2. Johannes Kepler University Linz, Linz, Oberösterreich, Austria

    Manuel Wimmer

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Mayr-Dorn, C., Zoitl, A., Weichhart, G., Mayrhofer, M., Egyed, A. (2023). Designing Strongly-decoupled Industry 4.0 Applications Across the Stack: A Use Case. In: Vogel-Heuser, B., Wimmer, M. (eds) Digital Transformation. Springer Vieweg, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-65004-2_2

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