Building an automation software ecosystem on the top of IEC 61499

Abstract

The adoption of Cyber Physical System (CPS) technologies at European level is constrained by a still emerging value chain and by the challenging transformation of manufacturing processes and business ecosystems that their deployment requires. This issue becomes even more challenging when the concept of CPS is exploited to propose cyber-physical machines and manufacturing systems, where the complexity of the controlling intelligence and of the digital counterpart explodes. As a matter of fact, the market behind CPS has a potential that is still scarcely supported by methodologies and tools able to foster the rise of a solid ecosystem required for a relevant market uptake. Multi-sided platforms (MSPs) have demonstrated to play the pivotal role of providing the environments and the technological infrastructures able to match make the needs of manifold user insisting on them. The manufacturing sector did not remain untouched by this trend and moves its first step towards the integration of platform logics across value networks: the CPS business ecosystem is one of those. In this chapter, beyond an analysis of the current state of the automation value network, the design and implementation of a multi-sided platform for CPS deployment within the automation sector are described. The proposed platform can provide the infrastructure to incentivize CPS adoption, creating the technological and value drivers supporting the transition towards new paradigms for the development of the software components of a mechatronic system. Developing an infrastructure on the top of which the CPS value network can be instantiated and orchestrated, the proposed platform provides the technical means to incentivize the creation of an ecosystem able to support especially SMEs in their transition towards Industry 4.0.