This paper provides an approach to create the digital thread associated to the value stream along a dairy process value chain. Identifying the different stakeholders within the dairy process, each of them is concretely positioned as provider of assets to be digitalized and networked using the Asset Administration Shell technology and this within an Eco-system formally specified by the 3D-Reference Architecture Model for Industry 4.0 (RAMI 4.0). The different sub-models of the Asset Administration Shells along the digital thread are then an essential part of the so called Digital Passport, which will be associated to different dairy products (milk powders, butter, whey, cheese, etc.). The Digital Passport is the core tool allowing all stakeholders for performing traceability of products and processes. It provides digitalized data and information, to be exposed and/or consumed as services, developed and shared in real-time by all the actors of the dairy supply chain, responding to strict dairy process business requirements.

Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, among others, are very promising methodologies and technologies that are emerging for implementing a broad spectrum of analytics within digitalized eco-systems. Analytics containing adequate analytical models are generating a burgeoning interest from Business Intelligence-, Information Technology (IT)- and Operational Technology (OT) -professionals, who are able to exploit the huge amount of internally and externally available data and information that lies behind digitalized components and systems and their associated processes. In this paper, the authors present the essential specifications of an analytical model developed and implemented applying the Knowldege Discovery in Databases (KDD) approach. The analytical model is the essential part of an analytics component, positioned as an digitalized asset within an Industry 4.0-compliant (RAMI 4.0) infrastructure, and used to optimize the industrial Soybean Oil Purification Process associated to the digitalized eco-system.

With the rapid development of information technologies, the computing, networking, and physical elements in industrial environments are becoming tightly amalgamated with each other, resulting in the formation of the so-called Industrial Cyber-Physical Systems (ICPS). These systems forge the core of current real-world networked industrial infrastructures, having a cyber-representation of physical assets through digitalization of data across the enterprise, along the value stream and process engineering life cycle, along the digital thread, and along the supply chain. Typical applications of ICPS include smart grids, digital factory, cognitive and collaborative robots, freight transportation, process control, plant-wide systems, medical monitoring, etc. ICPS often operate in an unpredictable and challenging environment, where various disturbances, such as unplanned natural events, human faults or malicious behaviors, software and hardware failures, etc., may occur during the automation process at runtime. Moreover, ICPS can exhibit strong reconfigurability and evolve structurally for many purposes. During this evolution, new and unforeseen possibilities in the service-oriented business process may appear among various ICPS components. In particular, new “emergent” behaviors may arise that need to be monitored, understood, managed and controlled. When there are significant uncertainties, such emergent behaviors could make the evolved ICPS unstable and unable to meet the quality/performance targets, even resulting in hazards. Well-designed machine-learning techniques have the potential to effectively address the uncertainties and disturbances in the automation of ICPS. They can also facilitate the automated discovery of valuable underlying rules and patterns to improve the performance of ICPS in all phases of their life cycles.

Cyber-physical systems (CPSs) have attracted increasing attention in recent years due to their promise for substantial and long-term benefits to society, economy, environment, and citizens. In addition, the rapid advances in computing, communication, and storage technologies have resulted in a revolution in the information communication technology domain and domination in the industry context. The utilization of CPSs in industrial settings has led to industrial cyber-physical systems (ICPSs), which, in conjunction with the information-driven interactions, enables large-scale cooperation in industrial facilities and among all the stakeholders of the value chain. Hence, the research on ICPSs is essential, especially with respect to the engineering of such systems for industrial applications. This article presents an overview of recent developments in ICPSs. We first introduce the architecture of ICPSs. Then, we review the developments of ICPSs in relevant research domains. Finally, this article concludes by presenting some potential future research directions on ICPSs.

In recent years, the investigations on cyber-physical systems (CPS) have become increasingly popular in both academia and industry. A primary obstruction against the booming deployment of CPS applications lies in how to process and manage large amounts of generated data for decision making. To tackle this predicament, researchers advocate the idea of coupling edge computing, or edge-cloud computing into the design of CPS. However, this coupling process raises a diversity of challenges to the quality-of-services (QoS) of CPS applications. In this article, we present a survey on edge computing or edge-cloud computing assisted CPS designs from the QoS optimization perspective. We first discuss critical challenges in service latency, energy consumption, security, privacy, and reliability during the integration of CPS with edge computing or edge-cloud computing. Afterwards, we give an overview on the state-of-the-art works tackling different challenges for QoS optimization, and present a systematic classification during outlining literature for highlighting their similarities and differences. We finally summarize the experiences learned from surveyed works and envision future research directions on edge computing or edge-cloud computing assisted CPS optimization.

This Special Section on ‘`Cloud-Edge Computing for Cyber-Physical Systems and Internet-of-Things’' is oriented to the dissemination of a few of those latest research and innovation results, covering many aspects of design, optimization, implementation, and evaluation of emerging cloud-edge solutions for CPS and IoT applications. The selected high-quality contributions cover a broad range of novel technologies and application scenarios in CPS and IoT. We hope that these accepted papers will produce long-lasting impacts, as well as stimulating and encouraging the international community to work on this exciting and impactful topic.

The academia-industry gap in computer science persists since last two decades at least. Industry expects that computer science graduates possess not only profound technical knowledge and skills but also transferable skills such as communication and collaboration in team, problem-solving ability. Students need to learn those skills during their university studies to be competitive in the market after their graduation. This paper first examines the skill gap between graduates and industry expectations, and the existing didactic approaches in computer science education. The authors then present how the Java programming course has been taught using the task-centric holistic agile teaching approach T-CHAT to enhance both technical skills and transferable skills in students. The learning process is described with learning activities and assessments that are constructively aligned with the intended learning outcomes of the course. This is work in progress, so evaluation of the course is planned for future work.

Digital modelling and simulation of manufacturing processes find increasing use in the manufacturing industry. This provides an opportunity to use model information and carry them over into the software development phase to realise automatic PLC code generation. This paper extends the work presented in [1] to enable generation of function blocks for resource components rather than manually coding FBs. The approach is based on mapping table based that allow users to select required functionality, such as auto and manual control, diagnostic, return to initial position for machine components. This mapping table is filled by a programmer and links the information together. The approach provides a structured code that is generated in the IEC 61131-3 Structured Text. Additionally, the paper presents a use case as a proof of concept implementation. The approach is formalized and justified from the viewpoint of the RAM14.0 specification and resulted in between 62 - 81 per cent time saving compared to manual coding of the FBs.

Engineers of today are required to fulfil the growing demand of interdisciplinary skills required by society and industry. They are expected to possess not only profound disciplinary knowledge and skills, but also a range of methodical, social and personal competencies. A number of teaching modules have been delivered that aim to enhance those competencies in engineering students To evaluate quality of engineering modules an instrument is developed. This instrument measures acquired competencies, quality of the teaching process and settings. This paper presents the evaluation instrument and reports on its validity and reliability.

A System of Cyber-Physical Systems (SoCPS) is a sensible combination of individual cyber-physical systems (CPS) to realise new functions digitalised and exposed as services in the internet. The Industry 4.0 concept also pursues this approach and thus realises flexible and individual production by implementing new functions on the shop floor and intelligently linking production lines. Due to this increased flexibility, environmental influences during the production process are becoming increasingly important. This work proposes an approach to integrate the influence of environmental parameters in relation to the behaviour of SoCPS. For this, the general use of environmental parameters with SoCPS is shown with their significance for Industry 4.0-compliant solutions. Furthermore, it will present how the environmental parameters can be measured and used by means of a cyber-physical sensor system developed and implemented conforming to RAMI4.0 specifications.

Autonomous Guided Vehicles (AGVs) are considered as one of the key enablers of smart factories which make possible smart and flexible transportation of pallets and material on shopfloor. However, existing AGV fleet management solutions often suffer from poor integration with real-time manufacturing operations information systems, which negatively affects scheduling of AGVs. To exploit the full potential of AGVs in achieving just-intime (JIT) transportation, there is a need for intelligent AGV fleet management system which not only integrate with manufacturing information technology (IT) and operational technology (OT) but also provide prediction for the shop-floor logistic based on real-time manufacturing operations information to optimize scheduling of AGVs. This paper presents an approach for a Smart AGV Management System (SAMS), which combines the real-time data analysis and digital twin models that can be deployed within complex manufacturing environments for optimized scheduling. For a proof of concept, a case study of a line side supply of components to a manual assembly station is presented.

This work presents the major characteristics and lessons learned by the development and prototype implementation of an event-oriented and cloud-based SCADA system that is constructed using a microservice architecture. The microservices are then utilized to propose an approach for implementing product-driven production systems under the RAMI4.0 specification.

The paper presents the major steps done for migrating the ICT-infrastructure associated to the management and control of an industrial plate extruder line to a RAMI4.0-compliant digitalized industrial system. An MES serves as a core edge where Operational Technology (OT) of the shop floor meets Information Technology (IT) located in the information and management levels of the factory. Responding to a major requirement for guaranteeing connectivity and interoperability between these two levels of the enterprise architecture, the vertical communication is created using a service-oriented MES that takes over the administrative functions from the subordinate OT components, implementing the layers 3 and 4 of the RAMI4.0-based digitalization dimension.

The industrial world is currently undergoing changes due to increasing digitalization and computerization in companies (Industry 4.0). Existing control and management components and systems located within the upper layers of an enterprise's structure are connected to the shop floor. With the current paradigm shift in manufacturing, the need for more collaboration between personnel with different fields of expertise arises. This means that members of a multitude of professions need to work and communicate with each other. These developments in the industry also have an influence on current education curricula at schools and universities. Interdisciplinary knowledge across different curricula is required to work in an Industry 4.0 environment. This paper presents a general methodology for the evaluation of academic curricula of a university with regard to Industry 4.0 related topics. Based on this methodology, a case study was carried out, examining study programs of the Faculty of Technology at the University of Applied Sciences Emden/Leer. As a result of the case study, we present recommendations to increase the coverage of Industry 4.0 relevant topics in the current academic curriculum of the university.

The European innovation project PERFoRM (Production harmonizEd Reconfiguration of Flexible Robots and Machinery) is aiming for a harmonized integration of research results in the area of flexible and reconfigurable manufacturing systems. Based on the cyber-physical system (CPS) paradigm, existing technologies and concepts are researched and integrated in an architecture which is enabling the application of these new technologies in real industrial environments. To implement such a flexible cyber-physical system, one of the core requirements for each involved component is a harmonized communication, which enables the capability to collaborate with each other in an intelligent way. But especially when integrating multiple already existing production components into such a cyber-physical system, one of the major issues is to deal with the various communication protocols and data representations coming with each individual cyber-physical component. To tackle this issue, the solution foreseen within PERFoRM's architecture is to use an integration platform, the PERFoRM Industrial Manufacturing Middleware, to enable all connected components to interact with each other through the Middleware and without having to implement new interfaces for each. This paper describes the basic requirements of such a Middleware and how it fits into the PERFoRM architecture and gives an overview about the internal design and functionality.

A standardized Communication / Information Protocol is necessary for implementing the 4 upper digitalization layers of Industrie 4.0-compliant solutions. OPC UA is one of the leading and preferred technology. Currently, there are many different OPC UA implementations available on the market. This paper gives an overview of existing solutions and shows the results of an initial benchmarking based on a set of evaluation criteria defined by the authors. Moreover, the manuscript identifies both free-of-charge and commercial solutions that are more adequate for implementing industrial applications.

Increased competition and customer' expectations forces industries (1st) to react more quickly and agile to marked trends, (2nd) to shorten their product release cycles, and (3rd) to create innovative and intelligent products able to self-adapt to their owners' or licensee' requirements depending on the current context. This paper presents (1st) an overview of a novel ICT engineering platform for rapid and collaborative engineering of product extension services addressing these challenges, and (2nd) a real-world application scenario of product extensions services for advanced maintenance functionalities of production machines, performed in collaboration with an industrial machine manufacturer.

Contemporary industrial systems are challenged by fast-growing requirements for agile and effective reactivity to rapidly changing market demands. To achieve this set of requirements, new technologies and paradigms like Internet-of-Things (IoT), Big Data Analytics, Internet-of-Services (IoS), and service-oriented architecture (SOA) are being introduced into the industrial environments. These advances result in the confluence of two dissimilar, but complementary domains: the physical operational technologies (OT) and the cyber information technologies (IT) domains. Convergence of these two domains in a cross-layer fashion implies a new set of two major requirements of components and systems: 1) structural connectivity and 2) functional interoperability. However, the wide variety and heterogeneity of industrial systems-especially in the factory floor-entails integration complexity, which is in contrast with the mentioned requirements. In this paper, we focus on how legacy industrial systems can migrate in a cost-effective manner to the new paradigm of integrated IT-OT levels. We propose an interoperability layer requiring no changes on the legacy device that maps field device data into an ISA95-based information model. The performance of our contributed open-source implementation is evaluated in several deployment configurations.

To meet the increasing requirements which are set for modern production systems regarding flexibility, reconfigurability and collaborative behavior, a common information, Communication & Control (ICT) platform for guaranteeing connectivity has to be put in place. Industrial Middleware, i.e. SW/HW solutions, which help connecting and mediating different industrial cyber-physical components of a distributed system (such as a production system) are an essential component of such a platform. The paper describes the assessment of existing industrial Middleware solutions which are targeting re-configurability and connectivity of modern industrial environments. It states a set of important functional requirements which need to be considered to select the right solution for individual use cases. A big emphasis is put into finding industrially applicable solutions.

Dual Kernel RTOS tend to have a long integration time for new hardware as the internal design of differentiating between real-time and non-real-time Interrupt Requests (IRQ) often creates the need to port hardware drivers like USB, Wifi or others to be able to handle RT-IRQs. This can take a serious amount of setup time which makes frequent changes in the hardware setup or even kernel updates, due to changes in the Kernel API, a tedious and time consuming job. This work gives an example on how to circumvent these problems through migration from such solutions like RTAI or Xenomai to native Linux real-time via the RT-Preempt patch and highlights the shortcomings of said patch via benchmarking. It also shows how to move from TDMA (Time Devision Multiple Access) to packet switching real-time. The approach thereby bridges the gap that Xenomai 3 Mercury currently doesn't fulfill as it is userspace only: the RTAI/Xenomai Kernel API as well as a useful replacement for RTnet. The overall scope thereby lies on creating a foundation for the implementation of a Linux based real-time middleware platform for Industry 4.0 and the IoT.

The world is assisting to the fourth industrial revolution, with several domains of science and technology being strongly developed and, specially, being integrated with each other, allowing to build evolvable complex systems. Data digitization, big-data analysis, distributed control, Industrial Internet of Things, Cyber-Physical Systems and self-organization, amongst others, are playing an important role in this journey. This paper considers the best practices from previous successful European projects addressing distributed control systems to develop an innovative architecture that can be industrially deployed. For this purpose, a particular design process has to be addressed in order to consider the requirements and functionalities from various use cases. To investigate the known practices, four use cases are enlighted in this paper, which cover a wide spectrum of the European industrial force, as well as industrial standards to support a smooth migration from traditional systems to the emergent distributed systems.

The connectivity between shop floor automation devices (OT level) and management systems (IT level) is becoming an essential research and innovation aspect that needs to be demonstrated with Technology Readiness Level six (TRL 6) and higher to make the Industry 4.0 paradigm an industrial reality. This paper describes the building of an Industry 4.0-compliant lab environment, which consists of a service-oriented shop floor (OT level) and three major management systems: an ERP system; a database; and a simulation for predictive maintenance (IT level). The architecture of the system follows the ISA'95 standard enterprise architecture, e.g. by assigning the components of the system to the corresponding levels of the ISA'95 model. A middleware acts as a common interface between these systems. Basic requirements for this middleware are interfaces to the lower level systems via OPC-UA and upper level systems by accessing a database. The middleware should be translated the data follows soft real-time requirements. This manuscript presents the major aspects that need to be taken into account for the selection of adequate industrial middleware, e.g. defining exactly which kind of data needs to be exchanged and with which semantics this data is going to be represented.

The manufacturing industry is facing a technology paradigm change, as also captured in the Industrie 4.0 vision as the fourth industrial revolution. Future smart industries will require to optimize not only their own manufacturing processes but also the use of products and manufacturing resources, their maintenance and their recycling. In this context the strengths and weaknesses of two key concepts, namely Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) and Intelligent Product (IP) are discussed, and it is suggested that an integration of these two approaches to meet the introduced emergent requirements is beneficial. The integration of CPS and IP is shown via two real-world industrial cases, covering different phases of the product life-cycle, namely the production, use and maintenance phases.

The articles in this special issue present the latest developments and achievements in industrial cyber-physical systems (ICPSs). The papers in this issue cover key areas on architecture, design,enabling technologies, and applications of ICPSs. Additionally, they present emerging trends and visions of ICPSs for future investigations.

Future industrial systems can be realized using the cyber-physical systems (CPSs) that advocate the coexistence of cyber and physical counterparts in a network structure to perform the system's functions in a collaborative manner. Multiagent systems share common ground with CPSs and can empower them with a multitude of capabilities in their efforts to achieve complexity management, decentralization, intelligence, modularity, flexibility, robustness, adaptation, and responsiveness. This work surveys and analyzes the current state of the industrial application of agent technology in CPSs, and provides a vision on the way agents can effectively enable emerging CPS challenges.

Cyber-Physical Systems and Internet-of-Things are a current pinnacle of technical, organizational, economical and social developments being present in all sectors of our lives, from industry to service infrastructures. When the Industry4.0 paradigm leaves the labs to come in broad daylight, understandable to be applied by small and medium enterprises is only a question of possessing the necessary know-how and of understanding the usability for all actors, from the normal worker at the machines and production lines to the production supervisors and company management. This paper describes an approach and associated methodologies and a practicable set of tools to support answering the second main question: how to educate and qualify human-resources in small and medium enterprises for migrating both structurally and functionally into an Industry4.0-compliant company infrastructure. Two examples of a training and qualification approach introduced as "Business Games for learning Industry4.0" are rounding up the paper.

Robotics constitutes a multidisciplinary area, congregating knowledge from different scientific domains. The learning of robotic systems requires the acquisition of multidisciplinary scientific bases, and high integration and synthesis abilities, which is not an easy task. This paper describes the implementation of a lifelong course that aims to provide a global insight on robotics field, introducing the concepts and technologies for different domain applications, namely industrial robotics, autonomous mobile robotics and robotics applied in medicine. This is accomplished in an international framework where individual knowledge and experiences will be confronted in a multidisciplinary level and intercultural environment.

This paper discusses, how current trends in the area of information, communication and control technologies (ICCT, e.g. Industry 4.0, Cyber-physical systems) are influencing the profile of an educational curriculum in the area of Industrial Automation engineering. The approach implemented by the University of Applied Sciences Emden/Leer in Germany, introducing a dedicated Master degree, as well as different facilities and students projects, is presented as an example.

Nowadays industrial companies need more agile and adaptable production systems to manufacture customized products faster and with a high level of process optimization. This agility in production requires flexible automation systems. One key capability such systems need to exhibit is effective connectivity and interoperability with different vendor-specific software and hardware tools, which often presents difficulties. This paper shares results and research experience in applying OPC UA technology, to establish communication between Programmable Logic Controller (PLC) based control systems and virtual engineering tool (Onevue) to enable interactive support and data collection during production. This paper provides an overview of the OPC UA client development for the Onevue. Based on the case study provided in the paper, results of the OPC UA client-server communication is reported.

Industrial automation systems have been established in various domain over the past decades exploiting standards, dedicated to network protocols, resource models, interfaces, programming languages etc. While systems increasingly get networked, the potential of their interactions and collaboration, especially in large-scale and complex settings, may unveil new business opportunities. A series of challenges have been systematically tackled the last years and demonstrated the feasibility of key parts. Among them, the IMC-AESOP has paved the way from web-service enabled systems to cloud-based industrial cyber-physical systems, and demonstrated with real industrial use cases various aspects with respect to next generation supervision control and data acquisition (SCADA) that may empower collaborative industrial systems. In this paper, a selected set of innovative results achieved within the IMC-AESOP project are summarized - migration strategies to the application of service based communication, system-wide introduction of Complex Event Processing capabilities, integration concepts between different generations of technologies and provision of cloud capabilities across different levels of production systems as well as experimentation in real industrial applications.

Current trends are showing the growing demand of embedded systems, related to cyber-physical systems, which consist of smart physical actors and/or sensors that are reachable e.g. with service-oriented technologies, cooperating and negotiating to behave showing systems-of-systems characteristics and without any defined hierarchical structures. Possible evolvable structures and emergent behaviors allow generating new features/functions by the collaboration of different components of the cyber-physical systems. These Systems-of-Systems characteristics of service-based cyber-physical systems used among others for manufacturing processes are very suitable to support the product life-cycle in the initial (production) phase of a product and are very suitable to increase the energy efficiency of a whole manufacturing system using context sensitive technologies during the running life cycle phase. This paper presents a brief state-of-the-art analysis for service-based manufacturing systems related to product life-cycle support in the initial phase and energy efficiency aspects.

Increasing complexity and decreasing time-to-market require changes in the traditional way of building automation systems. The paper describes a novel approach to automatically generate the Human Machine Interface (HMI) screens for component-based manufacturing cells based on their corresponding virtual models. Manufacturing cells are first prototyped and commissioned within a virtual engineering environment to validate and optimise the control behaviour. A framework for reusing the embedded control information in the virtual models to automatically generate the HMI screens is proposed. Finally, for proof of concept, the proposed solution is implemented and tested on a test rig.

Supervision and control systems are being deployed in industrial environments such as mining plants and manufacturing facilities to ensure a continuous and effective production at a minimum cost. Such systems monitor a whole range of devices and collect their data for several purposes like maintenance and control operations.

This paper describes an engineering approach suitable for a service-oriented control and monitoring environment in the industrial manufacturing area. Recent and current research projects (http://www.socrades.eu and http://www.imc-aesop.eu) have focused on the concepts, opportunities, feasibility and required strategies for the effective application of service-oriented architectures in the manufacturing domain, with systems potentially involving up to 10,000 distributed devices. Future work is now being focused on migration, engineering and performance optimization. This paper presents an engineering methodology. It describes an engineering path and proposes abstract engineering methods, based on a Petri net formalization, to better-support the problems that engineers face in the implementation of service-oriented control structures and dynamic behaviors, whilst at the same time minimizing training requirements. The described approach, methods and relevant paradigms (i.e., Service-Oriented Architectures (SOA) and High-Level Petri Net-based Orchestration) form the basis for the engineering-tools to be developed and used in an enterprise architecture based on the standard ISA'95.

The fusion of mechatronics, communication, control and information technologies has allowed the introduction of new automation paradigms into the production environment. The virtualization of the production environment facilitated by the application of the service-oriented architecture paradigm is one of major outcomes of that fusion. On one side, service-oriented automation works based on exposition, subscription and use of automation functions represented by e.g. web services. On the other side, the evolution of traditional industrial systems, particularly in the production area, as a response to architectural and behavioural (functional) viewpoints of the ISA95 enterprise architecture, where a close inter-relation between SCADA, DCS and MES systems facilitate the management and control of the production environment. Automation functions are increasingly performed by the composition and orchestration of services. Among other methods, the application of formal Petri net based orchestration approaches is being industrially established. This paper presents the major characteristics that such a Petri net based orchestration presents when it is developed, implemented and deployed in an industrial environment.

The procedure of migrating SCADA and DCS functionality of the ISA-95 process automation architecture to a Service based automation architecture is discussed. Challenges in such migration are discussed and defined. From here the necessary migration technology and procedures are proposed. The critical migration technology is based on the mediator concept. The migration procedure is based on a functionality perspective and comprises four steps: initiation, configuration, data processing and control execution. Its argued that these steps are necessary for the successful migration of DCS and SCADA functionality in to the automation cloud.

In a SOA-based system the applications are organized in a manner such that interoperable services can be used from different domains. In a process industry context, different domains can refer to, for example, process instrumentation and monitoring, execution of process control, data acquisition, etc. Large process industry systems are a complex and potentially very large sets of multi-disciplinary, heterogeneous, networked distributed systems. Current industrial process control systems are typically vendor specific; in addition the different domains are associated with different layers, different standards and different technologies. In the paper the authors report about the investigations and assessments performed to find answers for four major critical questions that arise as key when technologies have to be selected and used in a true Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) based distributed large scale Process Monitoring and Control system: (1) Real-time SOA (what are the limits of bringing SOA into high performance control loops?); (2) Management of large scale industrial distributed control systems (is it feasible to manage up to tens of thousands of service-oriented devices?); (3) Distributed event-based systems are asynchronous (what are the limits compared to traditional periodic scanning systems?) and (4) Service specification (which semantics are the most suitable for specifying process control and monitoring services?).

The last years we are witnessing of rapid advances in the industrial automation domain, mainly driven by business needs towards agility and supported by new disruptive technologies. Future factories will rely on multi-system interactions and collaborative cross-layer management and automation approaches. Such a factory, configured and managed from architectural and behavioural viewpoints, under the service-oriented architecture (SOA) paradigm is virtualized by services exposed by its key components (both HW and SW). One of the main results of this virtualization is that the factory is transformed into a “cloud of services”, where dynamic resource allocation and interactions take place. This paper presents a view on such architecture, its specification, the main motivation and considerations, as well as the preliminary services it may need to support.

A cloud based on energy related information, which is provided as services from all system components from the shop floor to the management systems, is a desire of the industry business. This paper is based on the first part of a Case Study applied to the multinational company Schneider Electric, focused to a System of Systems approach for Energy Management. It presents a State-of-the-Art analysis of some general topics related to System of Systems, Energy Management, and European Projects in order to understand the new architecture approached today, and their care towards Energy Efficiency. This background helped to start a Case Study, which in its first part regards to Energy Efficiency tools from machine builders and the next step to EcoStruxure program. This approach explains its methodology and architecture inside the industry business. It is concluded generally that Schneider Electric, as one sample of the companies providing solutions for the industry, care about developing products, services, and projects oriented to an Energy Efficient world.

Nowadays, energy is one of the most misused resources on Earth. This phenomenon is caused because of the continuing technological expansion in different areas such as building automation, oil & power, industry in general, and much more areas where energy consumption is extremely high. In this paper, the State-of-the-Art for Energy Management (EM) is based on the new technological advances which have been summarized in topics, such as: standard ISA 95, Web Services (WS), Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), System of Systems (SoS), European Projects, Industrial Implementations, and the future challenge for EM, ending with some conclusions. The purpose of this document is an analysis of the new technological approaches for EM, integrating from the actual communication protocols, human-machine interfaces (HMI), Supervisory-Control and Data Acquisition Systems (SCADA), Distributed Control Systems (DCS), sensors, actuators, used in different areas such as manufacturing, machine builders, power plants, water pumping systems, etc., beyond to large SoS integration. Finally, it can be summarized that this paper presents the actual State-of-the-Art about SoS technology focused to an EM research based on a topic that today has a lot of importance worldwide. As energy consumption in SoS is increasing, the objective today and in the future is to generate an energy efficient SoS.

Contemporary industrial automation struggle to cope with the continuous demand for high quality customized products at low cost at the same time that production lifecycle history proves that unexpected behavior arises, equipment fails and requirements are constantly adjusted. All this denotes a permanent need to reengineer in an fast and transparent manner in order to truly implement an agile factory. The present work includes a reference architecture and device model that tries to exploit Internet-based business models alongside Service-oriented Architecture principles and technology to assist the systems integrator during lifecycle reengineering interventions. All architecture elements are portrayed according to their roles and specificity being mutually interoperable to allow a customized mould according to actual system requirements, constraints and goals. The proposed device model follows above architecture guidelines and it supports the enhancement of the overall system ability in terms of agility and openness by laying over open web standards. It allows the transparent deployment of new services besides built-in services that support the discovery, identification, configuration and monitoring of a particular device.

Nowadays, Service-oriented Architecture (SOA) paradigm is becoming a broadly deployed standard for business and enterprise integration. It continuously spreads across the diverse layers of the enterprise organization and disparate domains of application envisioning a unified communication solution. In the industrial domain, Evolvable Production System (EPS) paradigm focus on the identification of guidelines and solutions to support the design, operation, maintenance, and evolution of complete industrial infrastructures. Similarly to several other domains, the crescent ubiquity of smart devices is raising important lifecycle concerns such as device setup, control, management, supervision and diagnosis. From initial setup and deployment to system lifecycle monitoring and evolution, each device needs to be taken into account and easily reachable. The present work exploits the association of EPS and SOA paradigms in the pursuit of a common architectural solution to support the different phases of the device lifecycle. The result is a modular, adaptive and open infrastructure forming a complete SOA ecosystem that will make use of the embedded capabilities supported by the proposed device model. The infrastructure components are specified and it is shown how they can interact and be combined to adapt to current system specificity and requirements. Finally, a proof-of-concept prototype deployed in a real industrial production scenario is also detailed and results are presented.

Up to now, most factories and their processes were designed and constructed with the cost as the most important economic factor. However due to the increased changes in energy sector, the energy optimization should be another key indicator for cross layer optimization. In order to achieve this optimization, energy has to be measured locally and almost in real time, while manufacturing control activities should also be aware of the energy consumed. Furthermore higher-residing decision support systems and enterprise services, will take also into consideration the overall energy consumption, for each process and optimize globally and locally. These goals are assisted with the increasing automation within the factories that can provide better visibility and efficiency of the shop floor.

The virtual manufacturing concept is based on the use of computational resources during the design of products and manufacturing systems, reducing the ramp-up time to market and the costs for the system's design, operation and reconfiguration. Combined with emergent paradigms for manufacturing control, such as multi-agent systems and service-orientation principles, and using a formal language to describe the system behavior, e.g. Petri nets, a truly and complete virtual production environment is achieved. This paper discusses this powerful approach to the virtual design and production environment driven by formal models, allowing users to design and deploy collaborative and reconfigurable automation applications in a faster and cost-effective fashion. A special attention is devoted to the process of migration from the virtual environment to the real world, aiming to reduce the transition time and increasing the efficiency of the process.

The expected behavior of industrial automation systems can be defined and modeled, but since not every event is predicted at design time, additional care has to be taken during the operation to handle situations such as exceptions, failures and new production orders. Another remark is also the limitation of modeling languages used in the control to permit the intervention of higher grade decision mechanisms. This paper discusses the application of decision support system for Petri net based processes to control automation components and devices. The decision mechanisms are used for path planning, production scheduling and preventive maintenance, to support the description of processes in Petri nets formalism. As such, the same Petri nets designed for the control are also used as analytical information input to the decision support system and for the detection process options that require decision. The solution provides a dynamic complement to the static modeling and operational flexibility. Experiments were done in a real service-oriented industrial factory-cell to prove the specified approach.

Service-oriented paradigm is becoming a suitable approach to address the demand for distributed and reconfigurable control systems in industrial and factory automation environments. This paper discusses a decision support system approach for the conflict resolution and exception handling in a service-oriented control architecture for industrial automation, that uses high-level Petri nets to implement the system process control. The proposed decision support system is based on two granularity levels, one related to decision mechanisms embedded in local control components and other related to upper and global intelligent entities that provide decision-making services.

Based on the integration of the service-oriented architecture (SoA) paradigm and existing 2D/3D based engineering systems, a new approach and corresponding tools for the design, development and application of modular virtual Web based production automation devices is presented in this paper. As apart of a 3D product lifecycle management (PLM) solution, Delmia automation was used to model the SoA environment, which brought the engineering of SoA to a complete workflow from the design of a product throughout the engineering of the production system. First developments have been applied to three pilot applications: a single virtual device, a mixed environment with one virtual and one real device, and finally an example of multiple virtual devices and instantiation on reusable components, thus showing that the initial requirements for the use of flexible reconfigurable devices in production are completely supported by the proposed approach.

This paper proposes a methodology for the development of collaborative (agent-based) production systems, using high-level Petri nets. The proposed methodology supports the development life-cycle from specifications analysis through to design-validation and implementation of collaborative and re-configurable production systems and their control systems, in an integrated manner. It covers a wide spectrum of application domains, ranging from intelligent mechatronic devices to multi-agent distributed manufacturing control systems.

This paper discusses a new approach to the development life-cycle of agent-based production control applications, from the design to the operation, based in a catalogue of high-level Petri nets. The high-level Petri net-based approach facilitates the conception, definition and formal specification of an "encapsulation process" in industrial production systems. The catalogue includes elements for the identification of manufacturing components, the development of agent-based control units, the formal validation of the models and the formal specification of complete collaborative automation scenarios

The holonic manufacturing paradigm allows a new approach to the emergent requirements faced by the manufacturing world, through the concepts of modularity, decentralisation, autonomy, re-use of control software components. The formal modelling and validation of the structural and behavioural specifications of holonic control systems assumes a critical role. This paper discusses the formal validation of the Petri Net models designed to represent the behaviour and specifications of the holon classes defined at ADACOR architecture.

New revolutionary manufacturing paradigms, which take advantage of the latest emerging mechatronics, information and communication technologies and integrate them in a highly dynamic and agile economic, technical and organisational manufacturing environment, are being researched and developed in the last decade. This new generation of manufacturing systems is referred to as intelligent manufacturing systems, and both the "holonic manufacturing system" and the "agent-oriented manufacturing system" paradigms have been presented in recent years as the basis for making such systems a reality. In this paper, the main specifications of the implementation of an intelligent manufacturing system at industrial level with agent-based control software technology are presented as a practical solution to the holonic control paradigm.

Petri nets have been proven to be specially adequate for modeling parallel and distributed systems such as flexible manufacturing systems. Moreover, they have a well-founded theory of analysis that allows for investigating a great number of qualitative properties of the modelled systems. In order to validate complex production system models with this tool, this work proposes a formal technique for qualitative validation of the system's specifications, based on the place-invariants of its coloured Petri net models. One example taken from the literature on FMSs is modelled by coloured Petri nets and analyzed by the proposed formal validation techniques.>