A Methodology for the Design and Creation of Asset Administration Shell for Manufacturing Systems

Within Industry 4.0 the communication between the physical and the cyber part of manufacturing systems is in growing rise in complexity. The Asset Administration Shell (AAS) is an information framework that represents the technological features of an asset. This work addresses the design of AAS by proposing a methodology to guide practitioners through the process of creating AAS models for manufacturing systems, and populating them with real-time data from the field. The aim of the paper is to design a methodology for the creation of AAS that is user friendly and functional to be followed by non-IT experts. The proposed methodology has been applied and validated within the Industry 4.0 Lab of the School of Management of Politecnico Di Milano

Unveiling Relations in the Industry 4.0 Standards Landscape based on Knowledge Graph Embeddings

Industry~4.0 (I4.0) standards and standardization frameworks have been proposed with the goal of \emph{empowering interoperability} in smart factories. These standards enable the description and interaction of the main components, systems, and processes inside of a smart factory. Due to the growing number of frameworks and standards, there is an increasing need for approaches that automatically analyze the landscape of I4.0 standards. Standardization frameworks classify standards according to their functions into layers and dimensions. However, similar standards can be classified differently across the frameworks, producing, thus, interoperability conflicts among them. Semantic-based approaches that rely on ontologies and knowledge graphs, have been proposed to represent standards, known relations among them, as well as their classification according to existing frameworks. Albeit informative, the structured modeling of the I4.0 landscape only provides the foundations for detecting interoperability issues. Thus, graph-based analytical methods able to exploit knowledge encoded by these approaches, are required to uncover alignments among standards. We study the relatedness among standards and frameworks based on community analysis to discover knowledge that helps to cope with interoperability conflicts between standards. We use knowledge graph embeddings to automatically create these communities exploiting the meaning of the existing relationships. In particular, we focus on the identification of similar standards, i.e., communities of standards, and analyze their properties to detect unknown relations. We empirically evaluate our approach on a knowledge graph of I4.0 standards using the Trans$^*$ family of embedding models for knowledge graph entities. Our results are promising and suggest that relations among standards can be detected accurately.Comment: 15 pages, 7 figures, DEXA2020 Conferenc

Arquitetura de uma plataforma informática para suporte aos processos da cadeia de fornecimento: caso de demonstração PRODUTECH4S&C

Dissertação de mestrado integrado em Engenharia e Gestão de Sistemas de InformaçãoA Indústria 4.0 veio revolucionar o modo como a indústria opera, introduzindo inovações tecnológicas, como Internet of Things (IoT) ou Cyber Physical Sistems (CPS), que sugiram com a evolução da informática ao longo dos anos. Esta inovação levou a uma mudança de paradigma e introduziu os desafios da digitalização dos processos industriais, bem como nos processos a montante e a jusante da cadeia de valor, acrescentando um grande fluxo de informação disponível a toda a cadeia, e portanto, necessidades de comunicação intra e inter-organizações. A digitalização dos processos industriais, nomeadamente, na cadeia de fornecimento pode envolver a necessidade de ligação de diferentes empresas entre todas as partes envolventes do processo, quer sejam elas internas ou externas à organização. Ao longo do tempo, o desenvolvimento de aplicações informáticas de suporte aos processos industriais evoluiu independentemente sem comunicação com outras aplicações informáticas, e sem requisitos para a ligação com empresas externas, o que resultou num conjunto heterogéneo de ambientes. Esta evolução "individualista" dificulta a comunicação (interoperabilidade entre aplicações informáticas) entre diferentes entidades, pelo que é necessário definir um conjunto de definições e protocolo (sintaxe e semântica) que permita a comunicação entre as aplicações, para poder existir uma eficiente troca de informações. Assim, surge este projeto de dissertação que procura conceber uma arquitetura para uma plataforma informática de suporte aos processos da cadeia de fornecimento, tendo por base modelos de referência existentes na literatura, como o SCOR, que se encontre alinhada para responder às necessidades dos processos da cadeia de fornecimento na Indústria 4.0. Pretende se elaborar uma arquitetura aplicando o método de four-step-rule-set (4SRS), esta deve assegurar incorporação de necessidades específicas relativas ao desenvolvimento tecnológico (como cloud computing, arquiteturas de micro-serviços, brokers, etc.) bem como permitir uma maior visibilidade dos players da cadeia de fornecimento e focar numa economia mais sustentável.Industry 4.0 has revolutionized the way industry operates, introducing technological innovations, such as Internet of Things (IoT) or Cyber Physical Systems (CPS), that have emerged with the evolution of computing over the years. This innovation has led to a paradigm shift and introduced the challenges of digitization of industrial processes, as well as in the upstream and downstream processes of the value chain, adding a large flow of information available to the entire chain, and therefore intra- and inter-organization communication needs. Digitization of industrial processes, particularly in the supply chain, may involve the need for different companies to connect all parties involved in the process, whether they are internal or external to the organization. Over time, the development of software applications to support industrial processes has evolved independently without communication with other software applications, and without requirements for linkage with external companies, resulting in a heterogeneous set of environments. This "individualistic" evolution hinders communication (interoperability between computer applications) between different entities, so it is necessary to define a set of definitions and protocol (syntax and semantics) that allows communication between applications, so that there can be an efficient exchange of information. Thus, this dissertation project seeks to design an architecture to a informatic platform that supports supply chain processes, based on existing reference models in the literature, such as SCOR, which is aligned to meet the needs of supply chain processes in Industry 4.0. It is intended to develop an architecture applying the four-step-rule-set method (4SRS), which should ensure the incorporation of specific needs related to technological development (such as cloud computing, microservices architectures, brokers, etc.) as well as allow a greater visibility of the supply chain players and focus on a more sustainable economy