Abstract
Abstract Digital factories comprise a multi-layered integration of various activities along the factories and product lifecycles. A central aspect of a digital factory is that of enabling the product lifecycle stakeholders to collaborate through the use of software solutions. The digital factory thus expands outside the company boundaries and offers the opportunity to collaborate on business processes affecting the whole supply chain. This paper discusses an interoperability architecture for digital factories. To this end, it delves into the issue by analysing the key requirements for enabling a scalable factory architecture characterized by access to services, aggregation of data, and orchestration of production processes. Then, the paper revises the state-of-the-art w.r.t. these requirements and proposes an architectural framework conjugating features of both service-oriented and data-sharing architectures. The framework is exemplified through a case study.
Highlights
Production processes are nowadays fragmented across differ- 38 ent companies and organized in global multi-tier supply chains. 39This is the result of a first wave of globalization that, among the various factors, was enabled by the diffusion of Internet- based Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) at the beginning of the years 2000
Accessing global customers opens up great opportunities for 46 firms, including small and medium enterprises (SMEs), but it requires the ability to adapt to different requirements and condi- tions, volatile demand patterns and fast changing technologies
The role of the digital factory is to integrate the different services and data and to combine them in order to make the whole process as efficient and competitive as possible in the achievement of the specific goals. Another important issue to be faced is the fact that the process can cover a space wider than the single factory: usually a factory gets the raw material from suppliers and provide products or semi-finished products to customers, through delivery agents, requiring the corresponding services and data to integrate to each other, or at least to be able to interact in a scalable and flexible way
Summary
Production processes are nowadays fragmented across differ- 38 ent companies and organized in global multi-tier supply chains. 39. At the same time, leading institutions and firms in Europe, and in Germany, have developed and published the Reference Architecture Model Industry 4.0 (RAMI 4.0) [3]. It describes the fundamental aspects of Industry 4.0 and aims to achieve a common understanding of what standards and use cases are required for Industry 4.0. Both the technological principles of digital factories and the RAMI 4.0 architectural principles are of particular importance for our purposes.
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