An Ontological Model To Integrate And Assist Virtualization Of Automation Systems For Industry 4.0

Automation engineering faces some challenges to properly address the development of automation systems and cyber-physical systems (CPSs) according to the concepts and principles of Industry 4.0. Currently, the design of these systems requires multidisciplinary knowledge to achieve integrated solutions, such as models, techniques, and technologies, commonly characterized by their complexity. The representation of CPSs, specifically the cyber-physical production systems, depends on describing dynamics behavior but also on relations, knowledge, and information. This is possible using formal engineering methods with other modeling approaches like ontologies. In this work, a semantic model is proposed to integrate automation systems and their associated components into a formal representation by employing an ontological model. The proposed model, the Automation 14.0 Ontology, is a modular approach that can represent several components of automation systems with an extended feature for the implementation in real environments through software applications and semantic automation networks. The ontology is intended to enable the representation and implementation of distributed service-based automation systems providing interoperability and cognition via ontology-based instances in the code, enabling the same format between applications and ontology files. Two case studies are proposed to show how the Automation 14.0 Ontology is easily integrated with Open Platform Communications Unified Architecture and how it can be used for model- and ontology-based developments of automation systems as a modeling, deployment, or virtualization method, obtaining extended features, such as online semantic reasoning and querying, assisted resource virtualization, and technological convergence with standardization, which currently are not provided by previous approaches.