The Interoperability Challenge: Building a Model-Driven Digital Thread Platform for CPS

Abstract

With the heterogeneity of the industry 4.0 world, and more generally of the Cyberphysical Systems realm, the quest towards a platform approach to solve the interoperability problem is front and centre to any system and system-of-systems project. Traditional approaches cover individual aspects, like data exchange formats and published interfaces. They may adhere to some standard, however they hardly cover the production of the integration layer, which is implemented as bespoke glue code that is hard to produce and even harder to maintain. Therefore, the traditional integration approach often leads to poor code quality, further increasing the time and cost and reducing the agility, and a high reliance on the individual development skills. We are instead tackling the interoperability challenge by building a model driven/low-code Digital Thread platform that 1) systematizes the integration methodology, 2) provides methods and techniques for the individual integrations based on a layered Domain Specific Languages (DSL) approach, 3) through the DSLs it covers the integration space domain by domain, technology by technology, and is thus highly generalizable and reusable, 4) showcases a first collection of examples from the domains of robotics, IoT, data analytics, AI/ML and web applications, 5) brings cohesiveness to the aforementioned heterogeneous platform, and 6) is easier to understand and maintain, even by not specialized programmers. We showcase the power, versatility and the potential of the Digital Thread platform on four interoperability case studies: the generic extension to REST services, to robotics through the UR family of robots, to the integration of various external databases (for data integration) and to the provision of data analytics capabilities in R.

Exploring interoperability of distributed Ledger and Decentralized Technology adoption in virtual enterprises

“…Virtual enterprises demand optimized and automated business process and are moving towards a digital and smarter organizational process. This entails the integration, interconnection, and interoperability of heterogeneous physical and virtual systems towards the enterprise goal (Margaria et al 2021). As emphasized by a recent study (Madine et al 2021), DLT has been employed across various environments including finance, insurance, real estate, healthcare, etc.…”

“…Interoperability was defined by IEEE as the capability of two or more components or systems to exchange information and to utilize the exchanged information (Margaria et al 2021). Accordingly, interoperability is the capability of two or more systems or components to cooperate regardless of differences in interface, language, and implementation platform (Dinh et al 2019).…”

“…Findings from the literature (Margaria et al 2021), suggest that RESTful APIs helps to share data between application frontend and the backend. RESTful APIs are commands encoded via the widely adopted HTTP standard to aid data exchange in many formats.…”

Model-Driven Edge Analytics: Practical Use Cases in Smart Manufacturing

“…The integration of FiWARE and eKuiper in DIME presented in this paper is a contribution to the construction of the Digital Thread Platform described in Margaria et al [15], that aims to include heterogeneous technologies within a DIME-based low-code platform for application development in order to facilitate a seamless and rapid development of end-to-end applications that include functionalities stemming from different domains. Currently, the platform also includes a persistence layer with MongoDB and ElephantSQL, analytics in R and using cloud-based services (AWS), IoT capabilities using MQTT directly and through EdgeX, and the already mentioned robotics and REST capabilities.…”

Low-Code Internet of Things Application Development for Edge Analytics

“…In the context of smart manufacturing, we are working on a Digital Thread platform [18] based on model driven development, that provides automatic code generation and deployment of heterogeneous applications that require the interoperability across different systems, technologies and programming paradigms. We choose model types with formal semantics, so that they are amenable to formal verification and analysis.…”