Industry 4.0 Solutions for Interoperability: a Use Case about Tools and Tool Chains in the Arrowhead Tools Project

Abstract

Industry 4.0 outlines the trend of the massively adoption of Internet of Things (IoT) nodes in supply chains, manufacturing, and factories in general. The industry digitalization is the key enabler to ease the productive process, drastically reduce its costs, and boost up the associated business. In this context, Arrowhead Tools (AHT) is a H2020 EU project provided by ECSEL that targets automation and digitalization solutions for the industry in Europe. AT is based on a framework, named Arrowhead Framework (AHF), developed and provided by the previous Arrowhead (AH) project. AHF is open source and addresses IoT-based automation and integration by abstracting IoT objects to services. AHF enables IoT interoperability and provides real time data handling, security features, automation system engineering, and automation systems scalability. In this paper, after a rapid overview of the AT project and the AHF architecture, we originally introduce the concept of Tool and Tool Chain for Industry 4.0 in AH. We also present a vertical AHT use case along with its implementation, as well as all the steps to turn a service/application into an AH-compliant Tool.

SOA-Based Platform Use in Development and Operation of Automation Solutions: Challenges, Opportunities, and Supporting Pillars towards Emerging Trends

“…Further, the literature review also provides a strong indication that a lot can be improved in terms of less engineering effort, time and costs for development, operation and maintenance (i.e., the whole lifecycle) of professional automation systems, if moving away from the old way and architectures used when developing such (cf. [1][2][3][4]9,[34][35][36]). However, these indications are not quantified.…”

An IoT Toolchain Architecture for Planning, Running and Managing a Complete Condition Monitoring Scenario

“…The AHA is the element that enables compatibility between any industrial device and the Arrowhead Framework. It acts as an intermediary between the two entities by exploiting two interfaces: an HTTP/REST one enables communication with the Arrowhead Framework and acts as an endpoint for remote interaction with the node, while the other interface exploits specific protocols to interact directly with the sensor to be integrated [25]. In the particular case of the gas sensor, the functionalities to be integrated are related to the reading of the sampled values and the changing of the duty cycle in which to operate, while the protocol used for communication with the node is MQTT.…”

Testing-Oriented Development and Open-Source Documentation of Interoperable Benchmark Models for Energy Systems

“…The existing standards providing a codified approach for the documentation of complex architectures, such as the IEC 813469 standard [26], adopt a general purpose perspective that is applicable to a wide range of industrial systems and products, but might be unable to capture some specific features of energy networks, such as their dynamic behaviour or the testing and validation procedures of their individual components. When more specific standards are developed, such as the ISO/IEC/IEEE 42010 standard [27] or the framework designed within the Arrowhead project [28], these tend to focus mostly on software and on ICT networks and typologies, hence incommoding their application on benchmark energy networks. Moreover, most of the established standards, such as for example [26] and [27] are not open-source and therefore not directly available to the power system community.…”