Danai Vachtsevanou

Danai Vachtsevanou, Andrei Ciortea, Simon Mayer et al.

Hypermedia APIs enable the design of reusable hypermedia clients that discover and exploit affordances on the Web. However, the reusability of such clients remains limited since they cannot plan and reason about interaction. This paper provides a conceptual bridge between hypermedia-driven affordance exploitation on the Web and methods for representing and reasoning about actions that have been extensively explored for Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) and, more broadly, Artificial Intelligence. We build on concepts and methods from Affordance Theory and Human-Computer Interaction that support interaction efficiency in open and evolvable environments to introduce signifiers as a first-class abstraction in Web-based MAS: Signifiers are designed with respect to the agent-environment context of their usage and enable agents with heterogeneous abilities to act and to reason about action. We define a formal model for the contextual exposure of signifiers in hypermedia environments that aims to drive affordance exploitation. We demonstrate our approach with a prototypical Web-based MAS where two agents with different reasoning abilities proactively discover how to interact with their environment by perceiving only the signifiers that fit their abilities. We show that signifier exposure can be inherently managed based on the dynamic agent-environment context towards facilitating effective and efficient interactions on the Web.

Kleanthis Thramboulidis, Danai C. Vachtsevanou, Ioanna Kontou

Today's customers are characterized by individual requirements that lead the manufacturing industry to increased product variety and volume reduction. Manufacturing systems and more specifically assembly systems (ASs) should allow quick adaptation of manufacturing assets so as to respond to the evolving market requirements that lead to mass customization. Meanwhile, the manufacturing era is changing due to the fourth industrial revolution, i.e., Industry 4.0, that will change the traditional manufacturing environment to an IoT-based one. In this context, this paper introduces the concept of cyber-physical microservice in the Manufacturing and the ASs domain and presents the Cyber-Physical microservice and IoT-based (CPuS-IoT) framework. The CPuS-IoT framework exploits the benefits of the microservice architectural style and the IoT technologies, but also utilizes the existing in this domain huge investment based on traditional technologies, to support the life cycle of evolvable ASs in the age of Industry 4.0. It provides a solid basis to capture domain knowledge that is used by a model-driven engineering (MDE) approach to semi-automate the development, evolution and operation of ASs, as well as, to establish a common vocabulary for assembly system experts and IoT ones. The CPuS-IoT approach and framework effectively combines MDE with IoT and the microservice architectural paradigm. A case study for the assembly of an everyday life product is adopted to demonstrate the approach even to non-experts of this domain.

Kleanthis Thramboulidis, Danai C. Vachtsevanou, Alexandros Solanos

Recent advances in ICT enable the evolution of the manufacturing industry to meet the new requirements of the society. Cyber-physical systems, Internet-of-Things (IoT), and Cloud computing, play a key role in the fourth industrial revolution known as Industry 4.0. The microservice architecture has evolved as an alternative to SOA and promises to address many of the challenges in software development. In this paper, we adopt the concept of microservice and describe a framework for manufacturing systems that has the cyber-physical microservice as the key construct. The manufacturing plant processes are defined as compositions of primitive cyber-physical microservices adopting either the orchestration or the choreography pattern. IoT technologies are used for system integration and model-driven engineering is utilized to semi-automate the development process for the industrial engineer, who is not familiar with microservices and IoT. Two case studies demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed approach.