Towards Service Deployment and Composition in Industry 4.0

The fourth industrial revolution (Industry 4.0) anticipates unplanned changes of production processes. Production changes may trigger synthesis, and preferably optimization, of architecture-level decisions, such as service deployment and composition. Performing such architecture-level decisions manually is difficult due to the ever-rising complexity of Industry 4.0 systems. In order to (semi-)automate the architecture synthesis and optimization, we propose an approach of service deployment and composition by using existing domain models. Our contribution is threefold: (1) We suggest a workflow with domain models for architecture synthesis in the industrial automation. (2) We display the formalization on a part of the workflow and provide an initial prototype of service deployment synthesis using a satisfiability modulo theories (SMT) solver. (3) We envision a way of service composition and code generation, and prototypically implemented it as conclusion of the suggested workflow. We demonstrate the practical use of the proposed approach in the Industry 4.0 scenario, i.e., flexible production of new products. Index Terms—Industry 4.0, IEC 61499, deployment synthesis, service composition, code generation, model-based development.