Georg Schäfer, Hannes Waclawek (Josef Ressel Centre for Intelligent and Secure Industrial Automation) Sarah Riedmann, Christoph Binder, Christian Neureiter (Josef Ressel Centre for Dependable System-of-Systems Engineering) Stefan Huber (Josef Ressel Centre for Intelligent and Secure Industrial Automation)
Keywords
IT/OT integration;Digital Twin;MBSE;BPMN;RAMI4.0
Abstract
The four Industry 4.0 design principles information transparency, technical assistance, interconnection, and decentralized decisions pose challenges in integrating information technology (IT) and operational technology (OT) solutions in industrial systems. These different solutions have conflicting requirements, making interfaces between them problematic for both systems and organizations. An Industrial Business Process Twin (IBPT) entity, acting as an intermediary between the realms of IT and OT, has been proposed in a previous work, to effectively reduce the amount of required IT/OT interfaces in an attempt of overcoming this situation. In this work, we investigate the effects of this approach during the design phase. We argue that, by eliminating interfaces between IT and OT components in the system design, this approach is therefore eliminating conflicting communication channels within the organization’s communication structure. In order to verify our argument, we develop a model of our IBPT concept according to the Reference Architecture Model Industrie 4.0 (RAMI4.0) using an Industry 4.0 scenario addressing the four essential Industry 4.0 design principles. Results show that the IBPT approach indeed eliminates potentially conflicting IT/OT interfaces during the system design phase.