A system of systems view on collaborative industrial automation

Abstract

Industrial systems are increasingly integrating Internet and other emergent technologies, concepts, methods and tools, coming from the IT world, such as cloud- or service-based approaches. As a first main consequence, the industrial automation landscape is also increasing in complexity, presenting new challenges for engineers and practitioners. Examples include dealing with evolvable heterogeneous structures that do not appear fully formed and where functions and purposes are added, removed or modified along the life cycle; as well as managing emergent properties and behaviours of entire systems, e.g. resulting from integrating new systems being not localized to any single system component. Although the component systems keep their operational and managerial independence, when they are interconnected and integrated, collaboration, cooperation and competition relationships, appear all along three major collaboration axes (lifecycle, value chain and enterprise), which should be understood, controlled and managed. In this work an effort to examine those systems under the prism of System of Systems approach, and address first recommendations to determine architectures, evolutionary steps, benefits, roadblocks as well as migration approaches that need to be followed is presented. © 2013 IEEE.