Architecting systems‐of‐systems and their constituents: A case study applying Industry 4.0 in the construction domain

Abstract

The development of system‐of‐systems (SoS) requires a continuous interplay between design decisions on the SoS level and those on the level of its constituent systems (CS), which often preexist and need to be adapted as the SoS evolves. This involves not only preparing the CS to participate in a particular SoS, but also designing the CS architecture to make it easily adaptable to a future SoS context. The problem is in part addressed in an emerging SoS framework in the manufacturing domain called Industry 4.0. It focuses on connected and digitalized production with the ambition of increasing flexibility and efficiency. This paper investigates how Industry 4.0 standards can be used in an SoS context to make CS more flexible and adaptive, and evaluates their usefulness outside manufacturing. The study is based on a case from the construction domain, for which a generic SoS architecture is developed. Several extensions and adaptations of Industry 4.0 are suggested, including specifications of ontologies for missions and workflows.

Patterns and trends in Internet of Things (IoT) research: future applications in the construction industry

“…Some conceptual studies are available too. These studies predominantly focus on narrows areas of integrating Industry 4.0 into the construction domain (Axelsson et al, 2019) or attempt to showcase the need or the nature of the change needed (Woodhead et al, 2018, Tang et al, 2019, Alaloul et al, 2020.…”

Evaluating Centralized and Heterarchical Control of Smart Manufacturing Systems in the Era of Industry 4.0

“…The Fourth Industrial Revolution (also known as Industry 4.0, Industrie 4.0, or I4.0) and related technologies have led to a significant evolution and transformation of the manufacturing systems. The key principles behind I4.0 are interconnection, information transparency, decentralized decisions, and real time technical assistance for human operators [2]. All parts of the manufacturing system should be connected with each other and have common data models.…”

Achieving System‐of‐Systems Interoperability Levels Using Linked Data and Ontologies

“…We have applied RDF as a basis for SoS interoperability in some larger cases (Axelsson, Fröberg, and Eriksson 2019;Axelsson 2019b), and some of the experiences will now be described.…”

“…Although the semantic web technologies are not concerned with the basic transfer of data, it is worth noting that Internet technology is playing an increasingly important role in SoS. This is obvious in applications such as the Internet of Things (IoT), but there is also a more and more common scenario where a system is given a representation in the cloud through a private data link, and then interactions with other systems occur between their respective cloud representations (Axelsson, Fröberg, and Eriksson, 2019). This cloud-to-cloud interaction is also based on Internet and WWW protocols, such as HTTP.…”

“…The use of linked data for SoS interoperability has been suggested in a number of papers, including Axelsson, Fröberg, and Eriksson (2019) and Axelsson (2019b) which apply it in the construction domain. Baek et al (2018) present the M2SoS meta-model for SoS, which was elicited in the context of a mass causality incident response system.…”