Interoperability for Industrial Cyber-Physical Systems: An Approach for Legacy Systems

Abstract

Contemporary industrial systems are challenged by fast-growing requirements for agile and effective reactivity to rapidly changing market demands. To achieve this set of requirements, new technologies and paradigms like Internet-of-Things (IoT), Big Data Analytics, Internet-of-Services (IoS), and service-oriented architecture (SOA) are being introduced into the industrial environments. These advances result in the confluence of two dissimilar, but complementary domains: the physical operational technologies (OT) and the cyber information technologies (IT) domains. Convergence of these two domains in a cross-layer fashion implies a new set of two major requirements of components and systems: 1) structural connectivity and 2) functional interoperability. However, the wide variety and heterogeneity of industrial systems—especially in the factory floor—entails integration complexity, which is in contrast with the mentioned requirements. In this paper, we focus on how legacy industrial systems can migrate in a cost-effective manner to the new paradigm of integrated IT–OT levels. We propose an interoperability layer requiring no changes on the legacy device that maps field device data into an ISA95-based information model. The performance of our contributed open-source implementation is evaluated in several deployment configurations.