Adaptive Integration of IoT with Informatics Systems for Collaborative Industry: The SITL-IoT Case

Abstract

Legacy industrial infrastructures are facing complex challenges to evolve to integrated solutions through the adoption of novel computing and business paradigms. The fast-growing collaborative businesses introduce the additional complexity of managing cooperative interactions among systems of business partners. The SITL-IoT research project aims to develop an open integrated and collaborative systems landscape for the silos agri-food industry. This case considers a silos' operator managing a maritime silos terminal in collaboration with the seaport administration, where trucks transfer bulk products to silos or bulk storages and distribute them to factories. The existing legacy management and supervision solutions are neither integrated nor properly prepared to cope with collaborative processes. Furthermore, the interactions with business partners are complex and follow dedicated integration solutions that pose difficult challenges in terms of management and evolution, since they do not follow open collaborative models or technology implementations. This paper discusses the problem domain and the approach to co-design and implement a technology-agnostic open integration infrastructure to support such collaborative network. The proposed approach considers a multi-supplier strategy for the adaptive integration of things on Internet of Things (IoT), considering the collaborative networks dimension.

A Collaborative Cyber-Physical Microservices Platform – the SITL-IoT Case

“…This work expands further the initial approach of the SITL-IoT project [12], aiming to evolve an industrial agri-food environment towards an agri-food ecosystem supported by an open, integrated system-of-systems. We present the first ISoS reference implementation and discuss its utilization for simplifying the management of artifacts supplied by alternative vendors.…”

“…The access facility offered by ISoS, through ISystem0, is accessible in any business collaboration context by following the appropriate authentication and security mechanisms. In the next section, we detail implementation issues of the reference ISystem0 developed in the SITL-IoT project with further contributions from [12].…”

Industrial Collaborative Robotics Platform

“…Most technological artifacts are not based on standard or reference models, which implies that the market does not moderate their cost. Thus, any change to the system, such as an integration requirement, is dependent on the involvement of those responsible for it, at a price that has no reference to be supported [23]. The fact that state-of-art relies on unique computer systems developed as custom software without a formal framework and open modularity foundations has been a barrier to sustainable innovation.…”

Open and Collaborative Micro Services in Digital Transformation

“…Whenever the changes required to migrate legacy systems compromise the system's quality, alternative strategies must be adopted. In this context, the SITL-IoT project [16] develops an open technology infrastructure for the industry agri-food sector adopting a System of Systems (SoS) framework that integrates Internet of Things (IoT) elements (a kind of IoT Bus).…”

“…The SITL-IoT project was motivated by the will of the FORDESI company to make FORSIL evolve towards an open IoT Bus, combined with cloud services [16]. The challenge was to (re-)structure the legacy FORSIL to make its functionalities available to other enterprise systems, both from internal and external business partners.…”