Prototyping Autonomous Robotic Networks on Different Layers of RAMI 4.0 with Digital Twins
This addresses interoperability challenges for stakeholders in Industry 4.0, but it is incremental as it applies existing Digital Twin concepts to a specific framework.
The paper tackles the lack of common standards for industrial IoT devices by using Digital Twins to prototype autonomous robotic networks across RAMI 4.0 layers, demonstrated with an autonomous ocean observation system from the ARCHES project.
In this decade, the amount of (industrial) Internet of Things devices will increase tremendously. Today, there exist no common standards for interconnection, observation, or the monitoring of these devices. In context of the German "Industrie 4.0" strategy the Reference Architectural Model Industry 4.0 (RAMI 4.0) was introduced to connect different aspects of this rapid development. The idea is to let different stakeholders of these products speak and understand the same terminology. In this paper, we present an approach using Digital Twins to prototype different layers along the axis of the RAMI 4.0, by the example of an autonomous ocean observation system developed in the project ARCHES.