From Mechatronic Components to Industrial Automation Things - An IoT model for cyber-physical manufacturing systems
This work addresses the problem of legacy system integration for manufacturing industries, but it is incremental as it builds on existing IoT models and technologies.
The paper tackles the integration of mechatronic components into IoT-based industrial automation by proposing an IoTwrapper software layer to convert them into Industrial Automation Things (IATs), with a prototype implementation demonstrating effectiveness.
IoT is considered as one of the key enabling technologies for the fourth industrial revolution, that is known as Industry 4.0. In this paper, we consider the mechatronic component as the lowest level in the system composition hierarchy that tightly integrates mechanics with the electronics and software required to convert the mechanics to intelligent (smart) object offering well defined services to its environment. For this mechatronic component to be integrated in the IoT-based industrial automation environment, a software layer is required on top of it to convert its conventional interface to an IoT compliant one. This layer, that we call IoTwrapper, transforms the conventional mechatronic component to an Industrial Automation Thing (IAT). The IAT is the key element of an IoT model specifically developed in the context of this work for the manufacturing domain. The model is compared to existing IoT models and its main differences are discussed. A model-to-model transformer is presented to automatically transform the legacy mechatronic component to an IAT ready to be integrated in the IoT-based industrial automation environment. The UML4IoT profile is used in the form of a Domain Specific Modeling Language to automate this transformation. A prototype implementation of an Industrial Automation Thing using C and the Contiki operating system demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed approach.