DSL-based Interoperability and Integration in the Smart Manufacturing Digital Thread

Abstract

In the industry 4.0 ecosystem, a Digital Thread connects the data and processes for smarter manufacturing. It provides an end to end integration of the various digital entities thus fostering interoperability, with the aim to design and deliver complex and heterogeneous interconnected systems. We develop a service oriented domain specific Digital Thread platform in a Smart Manufacturing research and prototyping context. We address the principles, architecture and individual aspects of a growing Digital Thread platform. It conforms to the best practices of coordination languages, integration and interoperability of external services from various platforms, and provides orchestration in a formal methods based, low-code and graphical model driven fashion. We chose the Cinco products DIME and Pyrus as the underlying IT platforms for our Digital Thread solution to serve the needs of the applications addressed: manufacturing analytics and predictive maintenance are in fact core capabilities for the success of smart manufacturing operations. In this regard, we extend the capabilities of these two platforms in the vertical domains of data persistence, IoT connectivity and analytics, to support the basic operations of smart manufacturing. External native DSLs provide the data and capability integrations through families of SIBs. The small examples constitute blueprints for the methodology, addressing the knowledge, terminology and concerns of domain stakeholders. Over time, we expect reuse to increase, reducing the new integration and development effort to a progressively smaller portion of the models and code needed for at least the most standard applications