IT/OT Integration by Design

TL;DR

The paper addresses the IT/OT integration challenge in Industry 4.0 by proposing an Industrial Business Process Twin (IBPT) that interposes between IT and OT to decouple concerns and reduce direct interfaces. It develops a RAMI4.0-aligned model of IBPT within a Nine Men's Morris scenario and evaluates it using the RAMI Toolbox, demonstrating that no direct IT/OT interfaces exist in the design, which, under Conway's law, should curb conflicting organizational communication channels. The approach leverages BPMN-oriented workflows, an OPC UA semantic information model, and MBSE tooling to enable early verification and cross-domain interoperability. The work highlights practical gains in defining interfaces at the business-logic level and outlines paths toward life-cycle integration and AAS-compliant Industry 4.0 components.

Abstract

The four Industry 4.0 design principles information transparency, technical assistance, interconnection, and decentralized decisions pose challenges in integrating information technology (IT) and operational technology (OT) solutions in industrial systems. These different solutions have conflicting requirements, making interfaces between them problematic for both systems and organizations. An Industrial Business Process Twin (IBPT) entity, acting as an intermediary between the realms of IT and OT, has been proposed in a previous work, to effectively reduce the amount of required IT/OT interfaces in an attempt of overcoming this situation. In this work, we investigate the effects of this approach during the design phase. We argue that, by eliminating potentially conflicting direct interfaces between IT and OT stakeholders within the organizational structure, this approach effectively eliminates conflicting communication channels within the system design. In order to verify our argument, we develop a model of our IBPT concept according to the Reference Architecture Model Industrie 4.0 (RAMI4.0) using an Industry 4.0 scenario addressing the four essential Industry 4.0 design principles. Results show that the IBPT approach indeed eliminates potentially conflicting IT/OT interfaces during the system design phase.

Figures (8)

• Figure 1: By Conway's law, communication structures within the organisation are represented in the system's design. Our approach eliminates interfaces between IT and OT components in the system design, which, by the mirroring hypotheses, therefore eliminates conflicting communication channels also within the organization's communication structure.
• Figure 2: Simplified illustration of the IBPT concept of twinning industrial business processes. The DT is in bidirectional exchange with OT and IT components. Interactions with business processes are represented by solid lines, whereas interactions with IT/OT components are represented by dashed lines. It thus decouples OT and IT concerns by acting as an intermediary / orchestrator between both worlds. Every interaction spawns a new process that orchestrates activities carried out by IT and OT components. In the sense of BPMN, this follows the principle of a workflow engine.
• Figure 3: Components used in the scenario of playing the game of Nine Men's Morris, demonstrating the four essential Industry 4.0 design principles introduced in hermann2016design.
• Figure 4: Reference Architecture Model Industrie 4.0 (RAMI 4.0) as shown in bitkom2015strategy.
• Figure 5: Nine Men's Morris Industry 4.0 scenario: Business process diagram.