The manufacturing industry is facing the challenge to address the individual requirements of customers that lead to increased product variety and volume reduction. Evolvable assembly systems (ASs) have been defined during the past years to enable quick adaptation of manufacturing assets to respond to the evolving market requirements. On the other side the manufacturing era is changing due to the fourth industrial revolution that will change the traditional manufacturing environment to an IoT-based one. In this context, this paper presents a framework for cyber-physical ASs with the intention to exploit the benefits of the IoT technologies but also utilize the existing huge investment based on traditional technologies in this domain. The framework is based on a model-driven engineering approach that has been extended to exploit IoT technologies for the automation of various tasks of the development and operation phases of the AS. A case study from everyday life was adopted to demonstrate the approach even to non-experts of this domain.