TY - JOUR
T1 - The architectural design and implementation of a digital platform for Industry 4.0 SME collaboration
AU - Liu, Zixu
AU - Sampaio, Pedro
AU - Pishchulov, Grigory
AU - Mehandjiev, Nikolay
AU - Cisneros Cabrera, Sonia
AU - Schirrmann , Arnd
AU - Jiru , Filip
AU - Bnouhanna, Nisrine
N1 - 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.
PY - 2022/2/12
Y1 - 2022/2/12
N2 - 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.
AB - 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.
KW - Application integration
KW - Digital platforms
KW - Digitalization
KW - Enterprise systems architecture
KW - Industry 4.0
KW - Ontologies
KW - SMEs
U2 - 10.1016/j.compind.2022.103623
DO - 10.1016/j.compind.2022.103623
M3 - Article
VL - 138
JO - Computers in Industry
JF - Computers in Industry
SN - 0166-3615
M1 - 103623
ER -