Summary Report

Annual Reviews in Control

2020

With regard to the wider area of AI/LT platform interoperability, we concentrate on two core aspects: (1) cross-platform search and discovery of resources and services; (2) composition of cross-platform service workflows. We devise five different levels (of increasing complexity) of platform interoperability that we suggest to implement in a wider federation of AI/LT platforms. We illustrate the approach using the five emerging AI/LT platforms AI4EU, ELG, Lynx, QURATOR and SPEAKER.

In today’s rapidly evolving digital world, legacy systems and siloed data are no longer sustainable. SNA Software’s latest white paper, The 21st Century Digital Ecosystem, outlines how embracing open standards like Linked Open Data (LOD), Modular Open Systems Approaches (MOSA), and responsible AI creates a smarter, faster, and more efficient digital infrastructure. By replacing outdated, hard-coded tools with flexible, no-code/low-code solutions, organizations can reduce cost, labor, and redundancy while improving data quality, integration, and real-time decision-making. This White Paper emphasizes that digital success in this century hinges on breaking free from proprietary barriers and focusing on customer-driven, interdisciplinary solutions. Key topics covered in the white paper include: • The limitations of 20th-century software tools and the shift to open, user-driven systems • The principles and benefits of Linked Open Data (LOD) for interoperability and data quality • How Modular Open Systems Approaches (MOSA) reduce risk and increase agility • The role of no-code/low-code platforms in accelerating solution delivery • The challenges and opportunities of Artificial Intelligence, including agentic AI vs. LLMs • Real-world case studies demonstrating cost savings, data value improvement, and faster insights • A customer-first model that aligns technology with real business needs and outcomes

Advances in Systems Analysis, Software Engineering, and High Performance Computing, 2021

Interoperability in smart manufacturing refers to how interconnected cyber-physical components exchange information and interact. This is still an exploratory topic, and despite the increasing number of applications, many challenges remain open. This chapter presents an integrative framework to understand common practices, concepts, and technologies used in trending research to achieve interoperability in production systems. The chapter starts with the question of what interoperability is and provides an alternative answer based on influential works in the field, followed by the presentation of important reference models and their relation to smart manufacturing. It continues by discussing different types of interoperability, data formats, and common ontologies necessary for the integration of heterogeneous systems and the contribution of emerging technologies in achieving interoperability. This chapter ends with a discussion of a recent use case and final remarks.

Applied Sciences

The fourth industrial revolution is characterized by the introduction of the Internet of things (IoT) and Internet of Services (IoS) concepts into manufacturing, which enables smart factories with vertically and horizontally integrated production systems. The main driver is technology, as Industry 4.0 is a collective term for technologies and concepts of value chain organization. Digital manufacturing platforms play an increasing role in dealing with competitive pressures and incorporating new technologies, applications, and services. Motivated by the difficulties to understand and adopt Industry 4.0 and the momentum that the topic has currently, this paper reviews the concepts and approaches related to digital manufacturing platforms from different perspectives: IoT platforms, digital manufacturing platforms, digital platforms as ecosystems, digital platforms from research and development perspective, and digital platform from industrial equipment suppliers.

This report summarizes the results from the OAGi/NIST workshop Drilling down on Smart Manufacturing-Enabling Composable Apps, which was held at the National Institute of Standards and Technology campus in Gaithersburg, MD, on April 18-19, 2016. The purpose of the workshop was to identify and discuss challenges in advancing the vision of composable manufacturing systems within the context of open cloud service platforms for Smart Manufacturing systems. The report describes (1) the idea of composable Service-Oriented Manufacturing systems as a basis for achieving easily assembled and re-configured Smart Manufacturing systems, (2) the results of five breakout sessions, and (3) the key findings from the workshop as well as the next steps planned for the workshop series. The breakout session descriptions provide an overview of respective R&D areas, their goals, capability gaps, proposed technology characteristics, and priority working items. Acknowledgement Authors would like to thank Simon Frechette, KC Morris, Al Jones, and Mike Brundage for their support in organizing the workshop. Also, special thanks to Chris Peters and Mark Carlisle who reviewed the document and helped with their suggestions to improve it. Any mention of commercial products is for information only; it does not imply recommendation or endorsement by NIST.

2020 IEEE International Conference on Smart Computing (SMARTCOMP), 2020

Industry 4.0 outlines the trend of the massively adoption of Internet of Things (IoT) nodes in supply chains, manufacturing, and factories in general. The industry digitalization is the key enabler to ease the productive process, drastically reduce its costs, and boost up the associated business. In this context, Arrowhead Tools (AHT) is a H2020 EU project provided by ECSEL that targets automation and digitalization solutions for the industry in Europe. AT is based on a framework, named Arrowhead Framework (AHF), developed and provided by the previous Arrowhead (AH) project. AHF is open source and addresses IoT-based automation and integration by abstracting IoT objects to services. AHF enables IoT interoperability and provides real time data handling, security features, automation system engineering, and automation systems scalability. In this paper, after a rapid overview of the AT project and the AHF architecture, we originally introduce the concept of Tool and Tool Chain for Industry 4.0 in AH. We also present a vertical AHT use case along with its implementation, as well as all the steps to turn a service/application into an AH-compliant Tool.

Future Internet, 2022

The use of mature, reliable, and validated solutions can save significant time and cost when introducing new technologies to companies. Reference Architectures represent such best-practice techniques and have the potential to increase the speed and reliability of the development process in many application domains. One area where Reference Architectures are increasingly utilized is cloud-based systems. Exploiting the high-performance computing capability offered by clouds, while keeping sovereignty and governance of proprietary information assets can be challenging. This paper explores how Reference Architectures can be applied to overcome this challenge when developing cloud-based applications. The presented approach was developed within the DIGITbrain European project, which aims at supporting small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and mid-caps in realizing smart business models called Manufacturing as a Service, via the efficient utilization of Digital Twins. In this paper, an...

Comput. Ind., 2021

The emergence of the Internet of Things (IoT), coupled with other capabilities such as Cloud Computing and many others, creates opportunities for the development of Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) at the scale of a digital business ecosystem. It will impact the way engineers work when designing, developing, deploying, operating, or maintaining complex systems-of-systems, with increasing needs concerning security, agility, and interoperability. The Federated Interoperability Framework (FIF) has been developed for Aeronautic Space and Defence over the last years to prepare and build continuous operational Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) interoperability. This paper aims at illustrating, defining, and demonstrating the required evolutionary nature of the FIF from its genesis, by describing past, last, and future evolutions, in particular for the PLM Standards testbed, Virtual manufacturing and CPS. Then Evolvability is defined and discussed, and the provided presentation of the FIF evo...

Future Internet, 2019

Industry 4.0 demands a dynamic optimization of production lines. They are formed by sets of heterogeneous devices that cooperate towards a shared goal. The Internet of Things can serve as a technology enabler for implementing such a vision. Nevertheless, the domain is struggling in finding a shared understanding of the concepts for describing a device. This aspect plays a fundamental role in enabling an “intelligent interoperability” among sensor and actuators that will constitute a dynamic Industry 4.0 production line. In this paper, we summarize the efforts of academics and practitioners toward describing devices in order to enable dynamic reconfiguration by machines or humans. We also propose a set of concepts for describing devices, and we analyze how present initiatives are covering these aspects.