The architectural design and implementation of a digital platform for Industry 4.0 SME collaboration

Accepted/In Press date: 24 January 2022

e-pub ahead of print date: 12 February 2022

Published date: June 2022

Additional Information: Funding Information: This work has received funding from the European Commission under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement n° 723336). Financial support has been provided from the National Council of Science and Technology (abbreviated CONACyT) to Sonia Cisneros-Cabrera (agreement n° 461338). Publisher Copyright:© 2022 Elsevier B.V. Funding Information: This work has received funding from the European Commission under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement n° 723336). Financial support has been provided from the National Council of Science and Technology (abbreviated CONACyT) to Sonia Cisneros-Cabrera (agreement n° 461338). Funding Information: This work has received funding from the European Commission under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement n° 723336). Financial support has been provided from the National Council of Science and Technology (abbreviated CONACyT) to Sonia Cisneros-Cabrera (agreement n° 461338). Funding Information: Our study aims at facilitating SME collaborations by addressing the barriers and challenges articulated above. Our main objective was to design and implement an I4.0 platform following a flexible and open architectural approach that supports setup and management of dynamic production networks and enables SMEs to embark on digitalized collaborations within the I4.0 context. The work discussed in this paper was conducted as part of the DIGICOR project 1 1 — a research and development initiative funded by the European Union and having the DIGICOR platform as its principal outcome. The architectural artefacts were derived following a systematic research method — the Design Science Research ( Hevner and Chatterjee, 2010 ), departing from real-world requirements gathered from project stakeholders and producing an extensible architectural artefact that provides a basis for further technical developments in the area of I4.0 collaborations. The key contributions reported in this paper are: Funding Information: The DIGICOR platform has been recently integrated into the European Connected Factory Platform for Agile Manufacturing (EFPF) 7 7 — an ongoing project funded by the European Commission’s Horizon 2020 programme on Factories of the Future. EFPF uses DIGICOR’s matchmaking and distributed production planning services to enable users to develop custom solutions to increase interoperability and efficiency across the supply chains. DIGICOR services such as TDMS ( Cisneros-Cabrera et al., 2021 ) are also being investigated in the context of supporting smart contracts and automatic B2B advice acceptance for forming supply chain collaborations, enabling hyper-connected autonomous supply chains where parts of the supply chain ecosystem constantly learn and undergo self-adaptations to increase supply chain efficiency. Future research will also study the computational complexity of tender decomposition and matchmaking covering cross-industry supply chains. Publisher Copyright: © 2022 Elsevier B.V.

Keywords: Application integration, Digital platforms, Digitalization, Enterprise systems architecture, Industry 4.0, Ontologies, SMEs

Local EPrints ID: 470618

URI: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/id/eprint/470618

DOI: doi:10.1016/j.compind.2022.103623

ISSN: 0166-3615

PURE UUID: 53b36d96-0b82-4129-a4db-a39c08965bcf

ORCID for Zixu Liu: orcid.org/0000-0002-4806-5482

Date deposited: 14 Oct 2022 16:47

Last modified: 06 Jun 2024 02:15