Technology enablers for the implementation of Industry 4.0 to traditional manufacturing sectors: A review

The traditional manufacturing sectors (footwear, textiles and clothing, furniture and toys, among others) are based on small and medium enterprises with limited capacity on investing in modern production technologies. Although these sectors rely heavily on product customization and short manufacturing cycles, they are still not able to take full advantage of the fourth industrial revolution. Industry 4.0 surfaced to address the current challenges of shorter product life-cycles, highly customized products and stiff global competition. The new manufacturing paradigm supports the development of modular factory structures within a computerized Internet of Things environment. With Industry 4.0, rigid planning and production processes can be revolutionized. However, the computerization of manufacturing has a high degree of complexity and its implementation tends to be expensive, which goes against the reality of SMEs that power the traditional sectors. This paper reviews the main scientific-technological advances that have been developed in recent years in traditional sectors with the aim of facilitating the transition to the new industry standard.This research was supported by the Spanish Research Agency (AEI) and the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) under the project CloudDriver4Industry TIN2017-89266-R

A new MDA-SOA based framework for intercloud interoperability

Cloud computing has been one of the most important topics in Information Technology which aims to assure scalable and reliable on-demand services over the Internet. The expansion of the application scope of cloud services would require cooperation between clouds from different providers that have heterogeneous functionalities. This collaboration between different cloud vendors can provide better Quality of Services (QoS) at the lower price. However, current cloud systems have been developed without concerns of seamless cloud interconnection, and actually they do not support intercloud interoperability to enable collaboration between cloud service providers. Hence, the PhD work is motivated to address interoperability issue between cloud providers as a challenging research objective. This thesis proposes a new framework which supports inter-cloud interoperability in a heterogeneous computing resource cloud environment with the goal of dispatching the workload to the most effective clouds available at runtime. Analysing different methodologies that have been applied to resolve various problem scenarios related to interoperability lead us to exploit Model Driven Architecture (MDA) and Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) methods as appropriate approaches for our inter-cloud framework. Moreover, since distributing the operations in a cloud-based environment is a nondeterministic polynomial time (NP-complete) problem, a Genetic Algorithm (GA) based job scheduler proposed as a part of interoperability framework, offering workload migration with the best performance at the least cost. A new Agent Based Simulation (ABS) approach is proposed to model the inter-cloud environment with three types of agents: Cloud Subscriber agent, Cloud Provider agent, and Job agent. The ABS model is proposed to evaluate the proposed framework.Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT) - (Referencia da bolsa: SFRH SFRH / BD / 33965 / 2009) and EC 7th Framework Programme under grant agreement n° FITMAN 604674 (http://www.fitman-fi.eu

Sustainability of systems interoperability in dynamic business networks

Dissertação para obtenção do Grau de Doutor em Engenharia Electrotécnica e de ComputadoresCollaborative networked environments emerged with the spread of the internet, contributing to overcome past communication barriers, and identifying interoperability as an essential property to support businesses development. When achieved seamlessly, efficiency is increased in the entire product life cycle support. However, due to the different sources of knowledge, models and semantics, enterprise organisations are experiencing difficulties exchanging critical information, even when they operate in the same business environments. To solve this issue, most of them try to attain interoperability by establishing peer-to-peer mappings with different business partners, or use neutral data and product standards as the core for information sharing, in optimized networks. In current industrial practice, the model mappings that regulate enterprise communications are only defined once, and most of them are hardcoded in the information systems. This solution has been effective and sufficient for static environments, where enterprise and product models are valid for decades. However, more and more enterprise systems are becoming dynamic, adapting and looking forward to meet further requirements; a trend that is causing new interoperability disturbances and efficiency reduction on existing partnerships. Enterprise Interoperability (EI) is a well established area of applied research, studying these problems, and proposing novel approaches and solutions. This PhD work contributes to that research considering enterprises as complex and adaptive systems, swayed to factors that are making interoperability difficult to sustain over time. The analysis of complexity as a neighbouring scientific domain, in which features of interoperability can be identified and evaluated as a benchmark for developing a new foundation of EI, is here proposed. This approach envisages at drawing concepts from complexity science to analyse dynamic enterprise networks and proposes a framework for sustaining systems interoperability, enabling different organisations to evolve at their own pace, answering the upcoming requirements but minimizing the negative impact these changes can have on their business environment

Towards Predictive Maintenance for Flexible Manufacturing Using FIWARE

Industry 4.0 has shifted the manufacturing related processes from conventional processes within one organization to collaborative processes across different organizations. For example, product design processes, manufacturing processes, and maintenance processes across different factories and enterprises. This complex and competitive collaboration requires the underlying system architecture and platform to be flexible and extensible to support the demands of dynamic collaborations as well as advanced functionalities such as big data analytics. Both operation and condition of the production equipment are critical to the whole manufacturing process. Failures of any machine tools can easily have impact on the subsequent value-added processes of the collaboration. Predictive maintenance provides a detailed examination of the detection, location and diagnosis of faults in related machineries using various analyses. In this context, this paper explores how the FIWARE framework supports predictive maintenance. Specifically, it looks at applying a data driven approach to the Long Short-Term Memory Network (LSTM) model for machine condition and remaining useful life to support predictive maintenance using FIWARE framework in a modular fashion

NEGOSEIO: framework for the sustainability of model-oriented enterprise interoperability

Dissertation to obtain the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Electrical and Computer Engineering(Industrial Information Systems)This dissertation tackles the problematic of Enterprise Interoperability in the current globally connected world. The evolution of the Information and Communication Technologies has endorsed the establishment of fast, secure and robust data exchanges, promoting the development of networked solutions. This allowed the specialisation of enterprises (particularly SMEs) and favoured the development of complex and heterogeneous provider systems. Enterprises are abandoning their self-centrism and working together on the development of more complete solutions. Entire business solutions are built integrating several enterprises (e.g., in supply chains, enterprise nesting) towards a common objective. Additionally, technologies, platforms, trends, standards and regulations keep evolving and demanding enterprises compliance. This evolution needs to be continuous, and is naturally followed by a constant update of each networked enterprise’s interfaces, assets, methods and processes. This unstable environment of perpetual change is causing major concerns in both SMEs and customers as the current interoperability grounds are frail, easily leading to periods of downtime, where business is not possible. The pressure to restore interoperability rapidly often leads to patching and to the adoption of immature solutions, contributing to deteriorate even more the interoperable environment. This dissertation proposes the adoption of NEGOSEIO, a framework that tackles interoperability issues by developing strong model-based knowledge assets and promoting continuous improvement and adaptation for increasing the sustainability of interoperability on enterprise systems. It presents the research motivations and the developed framework’s main blocks, which include model-based knowledge management, collaboration service-oriented architectures implemented over a cloud-based solution, and focusing particularly on its negotiation core mechanism to handle inconsistencies and solutions for the detected interoperability problems. It concludes by validating the research and the proposed framework, presenting its application in a real business case of aerospace mission design on the European Space Agency (ESA).FP7 ENSEMBLE, UNITE, MSEE and IMAGINE project

Monitoring and Information Alignment in Pursuit of an IoT-Enabled Self-Sustainable Interoperability

To remain competitive with big corporations, small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) often need to be more dynamic, adapt to new business situations, react faster, and thereby survive in today‘s global economy. To do so, SMEs normally seek to create consortiums, thus gaining access to new and more opportunities. However, this strategy may also lead to complications. Due to the different sources of enterprise models and semantics, organizations are experiencing difficulties in seamlessly exchanging vital information via electronic means. In their attempt to address this issue, most seek to achieve interoperability by establishing peer-to-peer mappings with different business partners, or by using neutral data standards to regulate communications in optimized networks. Moreover, systems are more and more dynamic, frequently changing to answer new customer‘s requirements, causing new interoperability problems and a reduction of efficiency. Another situation that is constantly changing is the devices used in the enterprises, as the Enterprise Information Systems, devices are used to register internal data, and to be used to monitor several aspects. These devices are constantly changing, following the evolution and growth of the market. So, it is important to monitor these devices and doing a model representation of them. This dissertation proposes a self-sustainable interoperable framework to monitor existing enterprise information systems and their devices, monitor the device/enterprise network for changes and automatically detecting model changes. With this, network harmonization disruptions are detected in a timely way, and possible solutions are suggested to regain the interoperable status, thus enhancing robustness for reaching sustainability of business networks along time

Methodology for enterprise interoperability assessment

Dissertação para obtenção do Grau de Mestre em Engenharia Electrotécnica e de ComputadoresWith the evolution of modern enterprises and the increasing market competitiveness, the creation of ecosystems with large amounts of data and knowledge generally needing to be exchanged electronically, is arising. However, this enterprise inter and intra-connectivity is suffering from interoperability issues. Not visible when it is effective, the lack of interoperability poses a series of challenging problems to the industrial community, which can reduce the envisaged efficiency and increase costs. Those problems are mostly caused by misinterpretations of data at the systems level, but problems at the organizational and human levels may pose equivalent difficulties. Existing research and technology provides several frameworks to assist the development of collaborative environments and enterprise networks with well-defined methods to facilitate interoperability. Nonetheless, the interoperability process is not guaranteed and is not easily sustainable, changing upon frequent market and requirement variations. For these reasons, there is a need for a testing methodology to assess the capability of enterprises to cooperate at a certain point in time. This dissertation proposes a methodology to assess that capability, with a corresponding framework to evaluate the interoperability process, applying eliminatory tests to assess the structure of the organizations, the conceptual models and their implementation. This work contributes to increase the chances enterprises have of interoperating effectively, and enables the adoption of extraordinary measures to improve their current interoperability situation

TRENDS AND PROSPECTS OF DIGITAL TWIN TECHNOLOGIES: A REVIEW

© Quantum Journal of Engineering, Science and Technology (QJOEST). This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND licence, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/The plethora of technologically developed software and digital types of machinery are widely applied for industrial production and the digitalization of building technologies. The fourth industrial revolution and the underlying digital transformation, known as Industry 4.0 is reshaping the way individuals live and work fundamentally. However, the advent of Industry 5.0 remodels the representation of industrial data for digitalization. As a result, massive data of different types are being produced. However, these data are hysteretic and isolated from each other, leading to low efficiency and low utilization of these valuable data. Simulation based on the theoretical and static model has been a conventional and powerful tool for the verification, validation, and optimization of a system in its early planning stage, but no attention is paid to the simulation application during system run-time. Dynamic simulation of various systems and the digitalization of the same is made possible using the framework available with Digital Twin. After a complete search of several databases and careful selection according to the proposed criteria, 63 academic publications about digital twin are identified and classified. This paper conducts a comprehensive and in-depth review of this literature to analyze the digital twin from the perspective of concepts, technologies, and industrial applicationsPeer reviewe

Internet of Things Applications - From Research and Innovation to Market Deployment

The book aims to provide a broad overview of various topics of Internet of Things from the research, innovation and development priorities to enabling technologies, nanoelectronics, cyber physical systems, architecture, interoperability and industrial applications. It is intended to be a standalone book in a series that covers the Internet of Things activities of the IERC – Internet of Things European Research Cluster from technology to international cooperation and the global "state of play".The book builds on the ideas put forward by the European research Cluster on the Internet of Things Strategic Research Agenda and presents global views and state of the art results on the challenges facing the research, development and deployment of IoT at the global level. Internet of Things is creating a revolutionary new paradigm, with opportunities in every industry from Health Care, Pharmaceuticals, Food and Beverage, Agriculture, Computer, Electronics Telecommunications, Automotive, Aeronautics, Transportation Energy and Retail to apply the massive potential of the IoT to achieving real-world solutions. The beneficiaries will include as well semiconductor companies, device and product companies, infrastructure software companies, application software companies, consulting companies, telecommunication and cloud service providers. IoT will create new revenues annually for these stakeholders, and potentially create substantial market share shakeups due to increased technology competition. The IoT will fuel technology innovation by creating the means for machines to communicate many different types of information with one another while contributing in the increased value of information created by the number of interconnections among things and the transformation of the processed information into knowledge shared into the Internet of Everything. The success of IoT depends strongly on enabling technology development, market acceptance and standardization, which provides interoperability, compatibility, reliability, and effective operations on a global scale. The connected devices are part of ecosystems connecting people, processes, data, and things which are communicating in the cloud using the increased storage and computing power and pushing for standardization of communication and metadata. In this context security, privacy, safety, trust have to be address by the product manufacturers through the life cycle of their products from design to the support processes. The IoT developments address the whole IoT spectrum - from devices at the edge to cloud and datacentres on the backend and everything in between, through ecosystems are created by industry, research and application stakeholders that enable real-world use cases to accelerate the Internet of Things and establish open interoperability standards and common architectures for IoT solutions. Enabling technologies such as nanoelectronics, sensors/actuators, cyber-physical systems, intelligent device management, smart gateways, telematics, smart network infrastructure, cloud computing and software technologies will create new products, new services, new interfaces by creating smart environments and smart spaces with applications ranging from Smart Cities, smart transport, buildings, energy, grid, to smart health and life. Technical topics discussed in the book include: • Introduction• Internet of Things Strategic Research and Innovation Agenda• Internet of Things in the industrial context: Time for deployment.• Integration of heterogeneous smart objects, applications and services• Evolution from device to semantic and business interoperability• Software define and virtualization of network resources• Innovation through interoperability and standardisation when everything is connected anytime at anyplace• Dynamic context-aware scalable and trust-based IoT Security, Privacy framework• Federated Cloud service management and the Internet of Things• Internet of Things Application