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

The architectural design and implementation of a digital platform for Industry 4.0 SME collaboration
The architectural design and implementation of a digital platform for Industry 4.0 SME collaboration
This paper presents the architectural design and implementation of DIGICOR — a collaborative Industry 4.0 (I4.0) platform aimed at enabling SMEs to dynamically form supply-chain collaborations so as to pool production capacities and capabilities and jointly address complex supply chain requests. The DIGICOR architecture builds on the event-driven service-oriented architecture (EDSOA) model to support the collaboration between SMEs, dynamic modelling of their systems and services, and their integration in the supply chains of large OEMs, enforcing digital platform governance rules for knowledge protection and security. In contrast to the extant platforms assessed through our systematic review, the proposed architecture supports the entire lifecycle of I4.0 collaborations, from creation of viable teams to deployment and operation. The architecture provides an open and extensible solution for (i) creating a marketplace for the collaboration partners, (ii) providing services for planning and controlling the collaborative production, logistics, and risk management, while supporting APIs for third parties to provide complementary services such as advanced analytics, simulation, and optimization; and (iii) seamless connectivity to automation solutions, smart objects and real-time data sources. We report on the design of the architecture and its innovative artefacts such as the component model description and the semantic model constructs created for meaningful event exchanges between architectural end-points. We also describe a running use case demonstrating implementation scenarios.
Application integration, Digital platforms, Digitalization, Enterprise systems architecture, Industry 4.0, Ontologies, SMEs
0166-3615
Liu, Zixu
1b07df56-a07b-4e78-bebc-38657ca80f76
Sampaio, Pedro
10e329f8-6256-4805-9732-a4c178646194
Pishchulov, Grigory
ed08563f-5d58-42f7-9b02-b807947fad93
Mehandjiev, Nikolay
a8559f54-9ca9-4821-91de-dd8751f6fd9f
Cisneros-Cabrera, Sonia
e4e92f36-f215-4e25-9b77-7892d2fab186
Schirrmann, Arnd
3077cdd1-24fd-4210-b504-1fa532a4dc12
Jiru, Filip
8966a231-d356-4d75-87d9-497c6234e7bb
Bnouhanna, Nisrine
f0e70e36-49c0-4c85-93a5-e76741c244b4
Liu, Zixu
1b07df56-a07b-4e78-bebc-38657ca80f76
Sampaio, Pedro
10e329f8-6256-4805-9732-a4c178646194
Pishchulov, Grigory
ed08563f-5d58-42f7-9b02-b807947fad93
Mehandjiev, Nikolay
a8559f54-9ca9-4821-91de-dd8751f6fd9f
Cisneros-Cabrera, Sonia
e4e92f36-f215-4e25-9b77-7892d2fab186
Schirrmann, Arnd
3077cdd1-24fd-4210-b504-1fa532a4dc12
Jiru, Filip
8966a231-d356-4d75-87d9-497c6234e7bb
Bnouhanna, Nisrine
f0e70e36-49c0-4c85-93a5-e76741c244b4

Liu, Zixu, Sampaio, Pedro, Pishchulov, Grigory, Mehandjiev, Nikolay, Cisneros-Cabrera, Sonia, Schirrmann, Arnd, Jiru, Filip and Bnouhanna, Nisrine (2022) The architectural design and implementation of a digital platform for Industry 4.0 SME collaboration. Computers in Industry, 138, [103623]. (doi:10.1016/j.compind.2022.103623).

Record type: Article

Abstract

This paper presents the architectural design and implementation of DIGICOR — a collaborative Industry 4.0 (I4.0) platform aimed at enabling SMEs to dynamically form supply-chain collaborations so as to pool production capacities and capabilities and jointly address complex supply chain requests. The DIGICOR architecture builds on the event-driven service-oriented architecture (EDSOA) model to support the collaboration between SMEs, dynamic modelling of their systems and services, and their integration in the supply chains of large OEMs, enforcing digital platform governance rules for knowledge protection and security. In contrast to the extant platforms assessed through our systematic review, the proposed architecture supports the entire lifecycle of I4.0 collaborations, from creation of viable teams to deployment and operation. The architecture provides an open and extensible solution for (i) creating a marketplace for the collaboration partners, (ii) providing services for planning and controlling the collaborative production, logistics, and risk management, while supporting APIs for third parties to provide complementary services such as advanced analytics, simulation, and optimization; and (iii) seamless connectivity to automation solutions, smart objects and real-time data sources. We report on the design of the architecture and its innovative artefacts such as the component model description and the semantic model constructs created for meaningful event exchanges between architectural end-points. We also describe a running use case demonstrating implementation scenarios.

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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

Identifiers

Local EPrints ID: 470618
URI: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/id/eprint/470618
ISSN: 0166-3615
PURE UUID: 53b36d96-0b82-4129-a4db-a39c08965bcf
ORCID for Zixu Liu: ORCID iD orcid.org/0000-0002-4806-5482

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Date deposited: 14 Oct 2022 16:47
Last modified: 18 Mar 2024 04:08

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Contributors

Author: Zixu Liu ORCID iD
Author: Pedro Sampaio
Author: Grigory Pishchulov
Author: Nikolay Mehandjiev
Author: Sonia Cisneros-Cabrera
Author: Arnd Schirrmann
Author: Filip Jiru
Author: Nisrine Bnouhanna

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