Model-as-a-Middleware: Information Model as an Integrator for Cyber-Physical Production Systems

Cyber-Physical Production Systems (CPPSs) have emerged as a cutting-edge manufacturing paradigm that aims to utilise innovative technological concepts like the Digital Twin and Artificial Intelligence to upgrade and optimise the productivity level of manufacturing environments. These concepts typically thrive on data and could be challenging to implement due to the semantic heterogeneity induced by the diverse manufacturing resources. Information modelling is a well-established approach traditionally used in software engineering to address semantic heterogeneity. Although the relevance of information modelling has already been established in CPPS, a suitable framework for information model development is not yet available. Therefore, our goal is to address this issue by proposing a domain-specific semantic information modelling framework for CPPS that enables the seamless integration of diverse manufacturing resources into intelligent business applications.