Industrie 4.0

How to make Industrie 4.0 easy? With BaSyx Middleware

BaSyx provides support for the digital transformation! Eclipse BaSyx is an Industrie 4.0 middleware. With BaSyx, production environments can be digitalized and Industrie 4.0 can be implemented easily.

BaSyx Middleware – easily explained with the model factory

Changing markets, the desire for individual products, as well as extensive documentation obligations present companies with new challenges. Industrie 4.0 promises to remedy this. However, taking this step into the digital future is a major obstacle for companies. But can Industrie 4.0 also be made easy? Frank Schnicke from Fraunhofer IESE shows how to do this.

If we look at the above definition of the BMBF for Industrie 4.0 from the perspective of systems and software engineering, numerous challenges emerge, particularly if, despite the rapidly increasing system complexity, the crucial system properties such as Safety in safety-relevant applications and Data Security as well as User Experience of a system must be guaranteed.   

To address these challenges, Fraunhofer IESE is working on scalable systems and software engineering methods for Industrie 4.0:

• in production,
• automation, and
• logistics.

Despite the complexity of real systems, these methods can be applied efficiently in practice. A special focus is on guaranteeing quality properties both by construction and with regard to quality assurance. In order to be able to give this guarantee, Fraunhofer IESE addresses various issues along the development lifecycle.

First of all, the question arises as to a suitable process for efficiently eliciting and evaluating the requirements on such complex, highly dynamic, and networked systems. Based on the requirements on Industrie 4.0, suitable system architectures can then be derived using the software architecture methods of Fraunhofer IESE. These enable an integrated view of the entire value chain from the sensors to Cloud services. They also contribute to guaranteeing the Safety, Security, and User Experience of these systems by construction.

The use of model-based methods means that particularly the analysis and simulation of the architectures is very important in early development phases already.

On the one hand, adjectives such as “autonomous“ or “self-configuring“ call for a large degree of (artificial) intelligence and adaptivity of the individual systems. The requirement for flexible networking, on the other hand, means that at runtime, systems of systems are created dynamically whose structure and overall behavior cannot be predicted – or can only be predicted with difficulty – at the time the single systems are developed. All these are factors that lead to uncertainties, i.e., features that are hard to predict and thus cause great uncertainties with regard to predicting the system behavior to be expected. This contradicts the execution of safety cases, which is centrally based on the assumption of deterministic, predictable system behavior.

Fraunhofer IESE meets these challenges with modular safety case processes as well as processes that allow safety cases and monitoring to be performed at runtime in order to account for the dynamics of Industry 4.0 systems.

More about the Fraunhofer IESE competence Safety Engineering

At the same time, the systems become more open as a result of collaboration with other systems, and thus more vulnerable to security attacks. On the one hand, this has an impact on safety; on the other hand, the elicited data must be safeguarded. The researchers at Fraunhofer IESE are therefore developing data usage control concepts that use so-called security policies to determine who is allowed to see or change which data to which extent and in which place. The use of corresponding mechanisms allows guaranteeing adherence to these policies at runtime. This makes it possible to use the data that is essential for Industrie 4.0 intensively, without losing usage control over it. With MYDATA Control Technologies, Fraunhofer IESE offers the appropriate technical implementation for this.

More about the Fraunhofer IESE competence Data Security

Application scenario 1: Asset administration shells enable continuous data access from the IT to the shop floor. The status of devices and orders is available at all times. Predictive maintenance, dashboards, and analyses can be realized at low cost thanks to BaSys. Sensor data, such as the energy consumption in milling processes, can therefore be used not only to predict the quality of the product, but also to determine when maintenance is due. The resulting optimization of maintenance intervals avoids downtimes and saves costs.

Application scenario 2: Documentation of product quality in real time: Thanks to the object model based on asset administration shells, users of BaSys 4.0 can process data from devices in real time and assign quality data to the current product. This data is stored in the product’s asset administration shell and is available at all times. By connecting this data to ERP systems and high-performance databases, such as SAP HANA, the data can be made available and analyzed at any time.

Application scenario 3: The service-based production architecture of BaSys 4.0 offers enormous advantages for manufacturing companies. Work pieces can be produced efficiently even in small quantities; lot size 1 becomes reality. 

More about the Fraunhofer IESE project BaSys 4.0

More about the Fraunhofer IESE project BaSys 4.2

The 4.0 wave started in the industrial production domain with the widespread concept of Industry 4.0 and has expanded to other domains like health, agriculture, and automotive. Regardless of the domain, 4.0 systems are characterized by trends like autonomy, service orientation, and product customization, and are engineered according to techniques based on digital twins, simulations, and continuous engineering. In this talk, Dr. Pablo Oliveira Antonino presents concrete instantiations of these concepts and techniques in the health domain and discusses the challenges faced and directions taken by medical devices manufactures, hospitals, and medical and technology practitioners towards the design, implementation, and adoption of so-called Health 4.0 systems.