Model Driven Development Process for a Service-oriented Industry 4.0 System

Industry 4.0 (I4.0) provides new technologies and capabilities, which are characterized by a decentralized distribution of tasks and functions, thus replacing the centralized, function-oriented architecture of the third industrial revolution. The service-oriented architecture is an approach in the context of I4.0, which can be used to implement the decentralized task distribution. The high agility and changing customer requirements associated with I4.0 pose a major challenge to the previous phase-oriented development process of industry plants. Furthermore, the existing development process can only deal with static industry architecture, in the form of implemented functionality. In this paper, we propose a model driven development process of a service-oriented I4.0 system, which helps to deal with the above mentioned challenges. We extended and implemented a detailed I4.0 service metamodel based on the reference model of service architecture (RM-SA) for I4.0 to model the service-oriented architecture. The resulted model can be connected with the system model and later used for code generation. The proposed approach helps to increase the reusability of service and system design and accelerates the reconfiguration process in case of changing customer requirement. Our result show that an industry 4.0 system can be described in a service-oriented way with the help of a service metamodel and a faster deployment can be achieved with model based tool support.