Decision-Making Support for View-Oriented I4.0 System Architecture Design

The vision of Industry 4.0 (I4.0) promises to facilitate synergies between suppliers, producers and customers along the value chain. However, leveraging these benefits requires mastering seamless integration of heterogeneous systems and technologies, as well as the horizontal and vertical integration of processes beginning with the design of I4.0 systems. Due to the heterogeneity of this endeavor multiple stakeholders within and across enterprise boundaries have to be involved in the design and operation of such I4.0 systems. Separate model development, following a view-oriented architectural design approach, may cope with this heterogeneity, but leaves open the question of how the complex process of coupling individual views can be supported. This article examines this problem from a decisionmaking perspective. Process theories and decision-support techniques in the field of system design are explored resulting in a first approach to a stakeholder-oriented design process of I4.0 systems. We show and discuss the feasibility of this approach by mock-ups of a decision support environment while demonstrating its applicability in a theoretical I4.0 use case.