Designing Strongly-decoupled Industry 4.0 Applications Across the Stack: A Use Case

Loose coupling of system components on all levels of automated production systems enables vital systems-of-systems properties such as simplified composition, variability, testing, reuse, maintenance, and adaptation. All these are crucial aspects needed to realize highly flexible and adaptable production systems. Based on traditional software architecture concepts, we describe in this chapter a use case of how message-based communication and appropriate architectural styles can help to realize these properties. A building block is the capabilities that describe what production participants (machines, robots, humans, logistics) are able to do. Capabilities are applied at all levels in our use case: describing the production process, describing machines, transport logistics, down to capabilities of the various functional units within a machine or robot. Based on this use case, this chapter aims to show how such a system can be designed to achieve loosely coupling and what example technologies and methodologies can be applied on the different levels.