A Step toward Solving Interoperability Problems

One of the greatest challenges facing Industry 4.0 is interoperability or efficient communication between different systems and domains. Interoperability is also at the heart of the Arrowhead Framework with its goal of enabling an exchange of information between devices and systems that is not constrained by underlying protocols or semantics.

In a step towards solving problems of interoperability, Cristina Paniagua has recently published a licentiate thesis proposing a set of design principles and tools that could contribute to more autonomous integration by generating automatic interfaces. Being able to generate automatic interfaces could lead to significant gains in efficiency by reducing the amount of human intervention needed in many day-to-day industrial operations. Interfaces, that are generated once and continue to facilitate all further interactions, also provide efficiency advantages over “translators” that need to intervene to facilitate communication between systems with every interaction. Using existing descriptions of interfaces Paniagua has, as part of her project, performed compatibility checks and completed and expanded existing interface definitions in order to avoid errors and blind spots. This allowed her to generate a new service-level interface that bridged the gaps identified. The next steps are to analyse the results and generate expanded theoretical models and new prototypes. Her work will also contribute to establishing semantic standards that are sufficiently generic so as to be transferable.

You can find out more about Cristina Paniagua’s work here.