Towards Industry 4.0: Gap Analysis between Current Automotive MES and Industry Standards Using Model-Based Requirement Engineering

The dawn of the fourth industrial revolution, Industry 4.0 has created great enthusiasm among companies and researchers by giving them an opportunity to pave the path towards the vision of a connected smart factory ecosystem. However, in context of automotive industry there is an evident gap between the requirements supported by the current automotive manufacturing execution systems (MES) and the requirements proposed by industrial standards from the International Society of Automation (ISA) such as, ISA-95, ISA-88 over which the Industry 4.0 is being built on. In this paper, we bridge this gap by following a model-based requirements engineering approach along with a gap analysis process. Our work is mainly divided into three phases, (i) automotive MES tool selection phase, (ii) requirements modeling phase, (iii) and gap analysis phase based on the modeled requirements. During the MES tool selection phase, we used known reliable sources such as, MES product survey reports, white papers that provide in-depth and comprehensive information about various comparison criteria and tool vendors list for the current MES landscape. During the requirement modeling phase, we specified requirements derived from the needs of ISA-95 and ISA-88 industrial standards using the general purpose Systems Modeling Language (SysML). During the gap analysis phase, we find the misalignment between standard requirements and the compliance of the existing software tools to those standards.