Cyber-Physical Microservices: An IoT-based Framework for Manufacturing Systems
This addresses the problem of software development complexity in manufacturing systems for industrial engineers, but it is incremental as it adapts existing microservice and IoT concepts to this domain.
The paper tackles the challenge of developing manufacturing systems for Industry 4.0 by proposing a framework based on cyber-physical microservices, using IoT for integration and model-driven engineering to simplify development for industrial engineers, with feasibility demonstrated through two case studies.
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.