Semantic Degrees for Industrie 4.0
This work addresses interoperability issues for engineers in industrial automation, but it appears incremental as it categorizes and maps existing technologies rather than introducing new methods.
The paper tackles the challenge of selecting appropriate semantic degrees for formalization in Industrie 4.0 systems to balance flexibility and efficiency, resulting in guidelines for engineers that were validated on public scenarios and use cases.
Under the context of Industrie 4.0 (I4.0), future production systems provide balanced operations between manufacturing flexibility and efficiency, realized in an autonomous, horizontal, and decentralized item-level production control framework. Structured interoperability via precise formulations on an appropriate degree is crucial to achieve engineering efficiency in the system life cycle. However, selecting the degree of formalization can be challenging, as it crucially depends on the desired common understanding (semantic degree) between multiple parties. In this paper, we categorize different semantic degrees and map a set of technologies in industrial automation to their associated degrees. Furthermore, we created guidelines to assist engineers selecting appropriate semantic degrees in their design. We applied these guidelines on publically available scenarios to examine the validity of the approach, and identified semantic elements over internally developed use cases targeting semantically-enabled plug-and-produce.