Manufacturing lines are subject to continual change as components inevitably wear down over time, necessitating replacement. Often, the exact original parts may no longer be readily available, or an upgrade to integrate new technology becomes desirable. The crux of these scenarios lies in swiftly and seamlessly incorporating these changes, minimizing disruption to the existing processes. To address this, we put forward a concept utilizing a digital twin, complemented by an open-source industrial IoT framework. This combination facilitates both software and hardware loop integration, paving the way for efficient co-engineering development with existing legacy systems. Through this approach, we enable swift technological integration, keeping the manufacturing process agile and up-to-date.

Lack of interoperability is a growing problem for the industry and the adoption of new technologies. Despite the current efforts in digitization and automatization, challenges regarding the integration and compatibility between heterogeneous devices and systems remain open. In the literature, new solutions can be found. To adopt them, the identification of the differences between service interfaces that hamper communication is critical. Automating the analysis and identification, which is currently based on manual operations, would significantly reduce the engineering effort and associated costs.This paper proposes a novelty approach to autonomously select the most suitable solution to address interoperability problems in the communication between heterogeneous systems. This work introduces the mismatch analysis system, designed as an expert system through the use of production rules, frames and fuzzy logic. The mismatch analysis system calculates the degree of compatibility and uncertainty between service interfaces and decides the best course of action to assist the communication between systems. The system has been successfully designed, implemented, integrated, and tested in the Arrowhead framework, demonstrating high potential.

Arrowhead Tools

The introduction of new technologies opens a wide range of new possibilities; however, it also leads to new challenges that need to be addressed to fully exploit the potential of such technologies. The identification of the barriers and challenges that preclude the adoption of Industry 4.0 helps identify solutions in the early stages and promote its establishment. One of the major problems facing the new technological paradigm is the lack of interoperability between heterogeneous systems.An initial step to solving this problem is the accurate identification of the interoperability mismatches between systems that preclude the consumption of services. This paper proposes the service contract as the main element in the definition and identification of interoperability problems that can occur in SOA-based heterogeneous environments. The presented approach modifies the traditional service contract viewpoint and introduces a new reformulation of the concept to adapt it to current technological requirements. The new service contract concept can be used as a core factor in the identification of interoperability mismatches at the service interface level. Problems related to the current definition of a service contract and potential solutions are introduced and discussed.

The integration of new technologies and industry digitalization concerns service interoperability and automation of engineering processes, which involve new and emerging requirements. The description of service contracts and the capability of machines to determine interoperability mismatches become significant. New approaches require a complete and structured definition of service contracts, and the service description can be used to automate the engineering of service translations to enable seamless interoperability.Nevertheless, current interface description languages remain unaffected and do not evolve according to the new specifications. This work presents an analysis of the commonly used description languages, WSDL, WADL, and OpenAPI, and a systematic comparison of them.The languages have been analyzed and compared based on key requirements for the development of new tools such as interface generators and service contract translators. The results of the comparison highlight the language limitations to fully describe the service contract. The misalignment between the available interface description languages and the service contract requirements is outlined to help extend these languages to fully describe the service contract in future improvements.

The Internet of Things (IoT) enables interaction from real-world physical objects using sensors to the virtual world of computers and the Internet. The use of service-oriented architecture (SOA) is one step in the creation of basic and complex interactions between several sensors and actuators. However, the use of SOA-enabled technologies alone does not meet all requirements of how sensor and actuator systems could be integrated to create distributed monitoring and control applications. The centralized, traditional method of communication in wireless sensor networks via a gateway presents drawbacks that have to be addressed; device-to-cloud communication adds higher latency and higher power consumption and is less robust than the device-to-device (D2D) communication approach. Moreover, all these characteristics reduce the scalability of the network, thus limiting the use of IoT in the industry. In this article, the proposed method utilizes the arrowhead framework orchestration system to generate service composition within a (wireless) network formed by IoT devices. The aim is to achieve efficient D2D service invocation to reduce the drawbacks of today's widely used device-to-cloud approach. The method in this article performs efficient service composition for industrial IoT, including mapping SOA service composition in very small resource-constrained devices using the arrowhead orchestration. The results presented in this article at the service level can increase performance and robustness in fog computing on resource-constrained devices.

During the last decade, technology changes and digitization have introduced numerous improvements and challenges in multiple areas of the industry, automation, and design of new architecture. However, the definitions of new naming conventions and identifiers that can be adapted to the new paradigm have not yet been considered. This paper analyzes aspects and characteristics that have to be included in the design of a naming convention consistent with the current Industry 4.0 requirements. As a result, this paper proposes a new naming convention for the Arrowhead Framework following the requisites and characteristics defined in the system of systems (SoS) integration. The proposed Arrowhead naming convention represents a renovated vision of the identification of services, systems, devices, and networks. A powerful tool in the quest of interoperability, security, service discovery, topology, and dynamic orchestration, as well as, a structured manner of defining meaningfully identifiers as help for developers.