XaaS Multi-Cloud Marketplace Architecture Enacting the Industry 4.0 Concepts

Abstract

Cloud computing in conjunction with recent advances in Cyber-Physical Systems (CPSs) unravels new opportunities for the European manufacturing industry for high value-added products that can quickly reach the market for sale. The Internet of Things joins the Internet of Services to enact the fourth industrial revolution that digitalises the manufacturing techniques and logistics while pushing forward the development of improved factories with machine-to-machine communication delivering massively customised products tailored to the individualised needs of the customer. Interconnected CPSs using internal and cross-organizational services cooperate in real time increase the business agility and flexibility of manufacturing companies. Using CPS with cloud computing architectures leverage data and services stored and run in cloud environment from different vendors that usually offer different service interfaces to share their services and data. However, when using such architectures data silos appear and different vendors having different service interfaces can easily result in vendor lock-in issues. This paper proposes a multi-cloud marketplace architecture leveraging the existing myriad of different cloud environments at different abstraction levels including the Infrastructure-, Platform-, and Software-as-a-Service cloud models-that is, Everything as a Service or XaaS-delivering services and with different properties that can control the computation happening in multiple cloud environments sharing resources with each other.

Organizational Agility in Industry 4.0: A Systematic Literature Review

“…It makes manufacturing more agile through servitization by integrating resources and capability, such as technology, thus making the technology of the company agile as well. Therefore, it is concluded that more and more companies adopt cloud computing technologies to increase agility within organizations [99], as the literature clearly supports the evidence of cloud computing and agility [100].…”

“…The IoT is one of the most important parts of Industry 4.0 ecosystem [121], and transitioning from traditional to Industry 4.0 environment requires the implementation of IoT and platforms [122]. Moreover, IoT platforms are also instruments used in enhancing the organizational agility [100] as they increase the agility of organizations with respect to the process [60], information system [91], facility [89], flexibility [71], management [117], manufacturing [61] and technology [79]. The embedding of (organizational) objects with the internet creates communication between them, and these objects start to exchange data among themselves [69], which results in the effective automation in the organization.…”

AMACoT: A Marketplace Architecture for Trading Cloud of Things Resources

“…The proposed work differs from others by implementing the architecture and addressing various aspects, including scalability and compatibility. A generic Cloud-based marketplace architecture is proposed in [8] to enable trading of IoT deployments. The architecture addresses the Cloud-IoT integration and vendor lock-in issues.…”

Revealing the Content of Industry 4.0: A Review of Literature

“…It is a mechanism for sharing information with collaborators. The cloud is characterized by its speed, which allows administrators to store data in the cloud and implement new systems to monitor and control processes through digital platforms [33].…”